What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-43272: ring-buffer: Fix possible dereference of uninitialized pointer

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-05-06 · updated 2026-10-21
• Weakness: CWE-476

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ring-buffer: Fix possible dereference of uninitialized pointer There is a pointer head_page in rb_meta_validate_events() which is not initialized at the beginning of a function. This pointer can be dereferenced if there is a failure during reader page validation. In this case the control is passed to "invalid" label where the pointer is dereferenced in a loop. To fix the issue initialize orig_head and head_page before calling rb_validate_buffer. Found by Linux Verification Center (linuxtesting.org) with SVACE.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: from 6.12 before 6.18.16; from 6.19 before 6.19.6 — fixed in 6.18.16, 6.19.6

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.18.16, 6.19.6. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a4afdff9c715af50cf6c3f2dc601932c2cea17a2
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/bc77986f3cb7476637052edf2d87137fa39f153d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d9942396845fef2369478c157b26738fe07142f6
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f1547779402c4cd67755c33616b7203baa88420b

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