CVE-2026-74359

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: configfs_lookup(): don't leave ->s_dentry dangling on failure Normally ->s_dentry is cleared when dentry it's pointing to becomes negative (on eviction, realistically). However, that only happens if dentry gets to be positive in the first place; in case of inode allocation failure dentry never becomes positive, so ->d_iput() is not called at all. We do part of what normally would've been done by configfs_d_iput() (dropping the reference to configfs_dirent) manually, but we do not clear ->s_dentry there. Sloppy as it is, it does not matter in case of configfs_create_{dir,link}() - there configfs_dirent does not survive dropping the sole reference to it. However, for configfs_lookup() it *does* survive, with a dangling pointer to soon to be freed dentry sitting it its ->s_dentry. Subsequent getdents(2) in that directory will end up dereferencing that pointer in order to pick the inode number. Use after free... This is the minimal fix; the right approach is to set the linkage between dentry and configfs_dirent only after we know that we have an inode, but that takes more surgery and the bug had been there since 2006, so...

Affected products

Kernel, Linux, Linux-Allwinner-5.19, Linux-Aws, Linux-Aws-5.0, Linux-Aws-5.11, Linux-Aws-5.13, Linux-Aws-5.15

CVSS 3.1

7.8 HIGH

EPSS

0.1% (2th percentile)

NVD status

Received

Published

2026-08-15

No exploit for CVE-2026-74359 has been indexed yet. Our index is built from live traffic and upstream syncs, so this page can only say what it knows — not that no exploit exists.