CVE-2026-53281

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

iommu/vt-d: Avoid NULL pointer dereference or refcount corruption

Commit 60f030f7418d ("iommu/vt-d: Avoid use of NULL after WARN_ON_ONCE") fixed a NULL pointer dereference in an unlikely situation partly.

If dev_pasid is not found in the dev_pasids list, it remains NULL. However, the teardown operations are executed unconditionally, this lead to a NULL pointer dereference or refcount corruption.

If the domain was never attached to this IOMMU, info will be NULL, which would cause an immediate dereference when checking –info->refcnt.

Even if info is not NULL, decrementing the refcount without having removed a valid PASID might unbalance the count. This could lead to premature dropping of the refcount to 0, potentially causing a use-after-free for the remaining active devices sharing the domain.

Fix it by returning early if dev_pasid is NULL, before executing the teardown operations.

Issue found by AI review and suggested by Kevin Tian. https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260421031347.1408890-1-zhenzhong.duan%40intel.com

Affected Software

Weaknesses

ADP Enrichment

kernel: iommu/vt-d: Avoid NULL pointer dereference or refcount corruption

Additional References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-53281
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2493728
• https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-53281.json

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/9022cb9ac0c2a72a57fa8ebf92ac74f953ca0153
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/cdfe3c9f2c9e28a8651ee463c88ad191ced2f840
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/79ea2feb917b05366b49d85573c9c5331f043b2c

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