CVE-2026-68174: tracing: Fix union collision of module and refcnt for dynamic events

Severity: unknown
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: 2026-08-10 · updated 2026-08-17

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: tracing: Fix union collision of module and refcnt for dynamic events In 'struct trace_event_call', the 'module' pointer and the 'refcnt' atomic variable share the same memory space in a union. For dynamic events, the union member is 'refcnt', which acts as an active reference counter. When a dynamic event (such as kprobe, uprobe, fprobe, eprobe, or wprobe) has a non-zero reference count (e.g. due to active event triggers or perf attachments), its 'call->module' evaluates to a small non-zero integer instead of NULL. When filtering or setting events for a specific module (e.g., writing ':mod:<module>' to 'set_event'), the code in '__ftrace_set_clr_event_nolock()' and 'update_event_fields()' reads 'call->module' directly without checking whether the event is dynamic. This causes the kernel to treat the small integer (refcnt) as a 'struct module' pointer, leading to a NULL/invalid pointer dereference (Oops) when dereferencing the module name. Fix this by ensuring that the 'TRACE_EVENT_FL_DYNAMIC' flag is checked before treating 'call->module' as a valid pointer in these code paths.

Affected products

Linux kernel: 6.14 — fixed in 7.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 7.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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