What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-98695: USB: serial: fix ioctl hangup race

• 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: 2026-10-18 · updated 2026-10-30

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: USB: serial: fix ioctl hangup race The tty ioctls can race with hangup and end up calling into a tty driver for a device that is already gone or powered down. Serialise the callbacks using the tty port mutex and add the missing checks to make sure the port has not been hung up before accessing port driver data or hardware. This specifically avoids dereferencing a NULL-pointer if a device is disconnected during lengthy break signalling. Note that TIOCGICOUNT and TIOCMIWAIT do not access port driver data or hardware and are therefore not affected by the race.

Affected products

• Linux: 2.6.26 — fixed in 7.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux 7.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/24d6edb6bd7f7a9e6cee2f8fe435781daab8aa0f
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3a728adbed9fd822f99a9d9c5ebad5c3b565ba4a
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4597ddd6168ae2a4123404e5f0871f1070dc7773
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7912a95d1345c77d8d63b530b00c118700b78abd
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/98f0a25134bfce44ebd1db0341fa0e8603ff276d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ae0da9a5c1ca95c20cc5feffd511ce6eae75924e
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ae0e61d95677efa778379853e495d748e6efbf95
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c7ef25e96dc3f808eb891bbbd43b6a682846eb0c

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