CVE-2026-23106: timekeeping: Adjust the leap state for the correct auxiliary timekeeper

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-02-04 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: timekeeping: Adjust the leap state for the correct auxiliary timekeeper When __do_ajdtimex() was introduced to handle adjtimex for any timekeeper, this reference to tk_core was not updated. When called on an auxiliary timekeeper, the core timekeeper would be updated incorrectly. This gets caught by the lock debugging diagnostics because the timekeepers sequence lock gets written to without holding its associated spinlock: WARNING: include/linux/seqlock.h:226 at __do_adjtimex+0x394/0x3b0, CPU#2: test/125 aux_clock_adj (kernel/time/timekeeping.c:2979) __do_sys_clock_adjtime (kernel/time/posix-timers.c:1161 kernel/time/posix-timers.c:1173) do_syscall_64 (arch/x86/entry/syscall_64.c:63 (discriminator 1) arch/x86/entry/syscall_64.c:94 (discriminator 1)) entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe (arch/x86/entry/entry_64.S:131) Update the correct auxiliary timekeeper.

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 6.17 before 6.18.8; 6.19-rc1, 6.19-rc2, 6.19-rc3, 6.19-rc4, 6.19-rc5, 6.19-rc6 — fixed in 6.18.8

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.18.8. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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