What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-80756: selinux: do not cancel a policy conversion that never started

• 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: 2026-09-03 · updated 2026-09-03

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: selinux: do not cancel a policy conversion that never started sel_write_load() calls selinux_policy_cancel() when sel_make_policy_nodes() fails, and that helper dereferences the outgoing policy to cancel its sidtab conversion. On the first policy load there is no outgoing policy: security_load_policy() returns early for that case, before it converts anything, and state->policy is still NULL. A first load that fails while building the selinuxfs tree therefore takes a NULL dereference in selinux_policy_cancel(), reached from a write(2) to /sys/fs/selinux/load. Skip the cancel when there is no old policy, mirroring the check security_load_policy() already makes before it converts.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 5.10 — fixed in 7.2

How to fix

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

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1059789ae9f99cbbe3a78e361e9c0976beb5958b
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1acc317d67a755a45e32419a15d70e403fa43f0e
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1b4ff94ae7c580c880291519fb0e3e2bd075beef
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/219c96de5d9b6b4af7e8576ad897b774cc3ee9a7
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2d29983104f06f5b0babcd5a25a0f0408272cd27
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a42932c6aa33d0aac683cacdf1ec7009b955ba5d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a4f182f8715cb0819445f0850cd5436828f4bafc
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e5c0235a3c4e9eb047a16cd02323fe4ecf2f570e

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