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SECURITY ANNOUNCEMENT

CVE-2026-99223

2 November 2026

KEYCTL_READ returns the serial numbers in a keyring in associative-array traversal order. The first word of the index is a public, deterministic hash of the type pointer, domain pointer and description. An unprivileged user can therefore insert keys with known descriptions, predict their order for each possible KASLR slide, and recover the kernel image address. On an x86-64 build with 16 MiB alignment, 45 user keys suffice to distinguish the candidate slides.

Remove the addresses from the whole index, not just its first hash word. Assign each key type and domain a nonzero 64-bit ID and hash those IDs and the description with a once-initialized SipHash key. Use the full IDs in the later index chunks as well. Truncating or hashing the IDs there would lose the guarantee that distinct type/domain/description tuples have a differing index bit.

Allocate IDs lazily since private key types need not be registered. Cache them in the index key so tree walks and copies of an existing index do not need to dereference a type descriptor that may have been unregistered. Keep the 32-bit chunk layout and diff_objects() bit offsets consistent, and retain the separate root slot for keyrings used by recursive search. The key comparison, permissions and userspace data format are unchanged; only the address-dependent in-memory ordering is replaced.

Introduced

3.13 b2a4df200d570b2c33a57e1ebfa5896e4bc81b69

Fixed releases

5.10.273 9ebe824d55983c9f063a2c9ef1a08b29812d406f

5.15.224 e108b22999edbc6f431466baf6b2016c19b7ed31

6.1.191 9f084ef0beb68091e96ab96f0e95579aac8a77f9

6.12.115 13fc051269d670810d9e314061b61c6dd06116a0

6.18.60 61ac0585d9f4344d3dfb84b5edff1fee7d532897

6.6.161 8451d4a4c43127c3b9fdf9fc9ff3fea5539a61f9

7.2.14 84f7c699f8d139f743c7dc11ef41d085690955bb

7.3.1 a113eba06bd1183c614d7994864d6e7054140cb9

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