CVE-2026-80726 — KVM: x86/mmu: WARN and clear role.invalid when creating a child shadow page

Affected: Linux

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

KVM: x86/mmu: WARN and clear role.invalid when creating a child shadow page

Explicitly clear role.invalid when deriving a child shadow page's role from its parent to harden against bugs elsewhere in KVM, as violating KVM's invariant that invalid pages are NOT on the list of active MMU pages leads to use-after-free due to __kvm_mmu_prepare_zap_page() using list_add() instead of list_move() when processing an invalid shadow page, i.e. makes a bad situation far worse.

Yell loudly if the parent is invalid, as it means KVM has missed a validity check, i.e. KVM is attempting to map memory using an invalid/obsolete root, but continue on as the child is otherwise still a valid shadow page.

================================================================== BUG: KASAN: slab-use-after-free in __kvm_mmu_get_shadow_page+0x1817/0x1860 [kvm] Write of size 8 at addr ff11000153dd1368 by task repro/853

CPU: 1 UID: 1000 PID: 853 Comm: repro Not tainted 7.2.0-rc2-3aec122bdcaf-next-vm #5 PREEMPT Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009), BIOS 0.0.0 02/06/2015 Call Trace: <TASK> dump_stack_lvl+0x4b/0x70 print_report+0x153/0x49c kasan_report+0xbc/0xf0 __kvm_mmu_get_shadow_page+0x1817/0x1860 [kvm] mmu_alloc_root+0x141/0x320 [kvm] kvm_mmu_load+0x612/0x20f0 [kvm] kvm_arch_vcpu_ioctl_run+0x3dd5/0x6150 [kvm] kvm_vcpu_ioctl+0x5e4/0x10d0 [kvm] __x64_sys_ioctl+0x131/0x1b0 do_sysca…

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CVE-2026-80726 — KVM: x86/mmu: WARN and clear role.invalid when creating a child shadow page