CVE-2026-53360 — KVM: SEV: Require in-GHCB scratch area if GHCB v2+ is in use

Affected: Linux

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

KVM: SEV: Require in-GHCB scratch area if GHCB v2+ is in use

As per the GHCB spec, when using GHCB v2+ require the software scratch area to reside in the GHCB's shared buffer. Note, things like Page State Change (PSC) requests _rely_ on this behavior, as the guest can't provide a length when making the request, i.e. the size of the guest payload is bounded by the size of the shared buffer.

Failure to force usage of the GHCB, and a slew of other flaws, lets a malicious SNP guest corrupt host kernel heap memory, and leak host heap layout information.

setup_vmgexit_scratch() allocates a buffer via kvzalloc(exit_info_2), where exit_info_2 is guest-controlled. With exit_info_2=24, this yields a 24-byte allocation in kmalloc-cg-32 (32-byte slab objects). The buffer holds an 8-byte psc_hdr followed by 8-byte psc_entry structs, so only entries[0] and entries[1] are in-bounds.

snp_begin_psc() validates end_entry against VMGEXIT_PSC_MAX_COUNT (253) but NOT against the actual buffer size:

idx_end = hdr->end_entry;

if (idx_end >= VMGEXIT_PSC_MAX_COUNT) { // checks 253, not buffer snp_complete_psc(svm, ...); return 1; }

for (idx = idx_start; idx <= idx_end; idx++) { entry_start = entries[idx]; // OOB when idx >= 2

The guest sets end_entry=10+, causing the host to iterate entries[2+] which are OOB into adjacent slab objects. For each OOB entry:…

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CVE-2026-53360 — KVM: SEV: Require in-GHCB scratch area if GHCB v2+ is in use