CVE-2026-64294 PUBLISHED

mm: do file ownership checks with the proper mount idmap

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 19.07.2026 Published: 25.07.2026 Updated: 25.07.2026

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm: do file ownership checks with the proper mount idmap

Ever since idmapped mounts were introduced, inode ownership checks (for side-channel protection) in mincore() and madvise(MADV_PAGEOUT) were done against the nop_mnt_idmap, which completely ignores the file's mount's idmap. This results in odd edgecases like:

1) mount/bind-mount with an idmap userA:userB:1 2) userB runs an owner_or_capable() check on file that is owned by userA on-disk/in-memory, but owned by userB after idmap translation 3) owner_or_capable() mysteriously fails as the correct idmap wasn't supplied

In the case of mincore/madvise MADV_PAGEOUT, this is usually benign, because file_permission(file, MAY_WRITE) will probably succeed, as it uses the proper idmap internally, but it does not need to be the case on e.g a 0444 file where even the owner itself doesn't have permissions to write to it.

Since this is clearly not trivial to get right, introduce a file_owner_or_capable() that can carry the correct semantics, and switch the various users in mm to it.

The issue was found by manual code inspection & an off-list discussion with Jan Kara.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 9caccd41541a6f7d6279928d9f971f6642c361af to 744b23aa430d52f5c8e4dbff7d71496d6643bed2 (excl.)
  • affected from 9caccd41541a6f7d6279928d9f971f6642c361af to 8344bdf0629457e532797b42d9d2bbf2a2900bbf (excl.)
  • affected from 9caccd41541a6f7d6279928d9f971f6642c361af to 5c942ad7df75925ee166e7f0fb36892d8dde376b (excl.)
  • affected from 9caccd41541a6f7d6279928d9f971f6642c361af to 04ba248d02d9eaa3d9077b00a6134caa75fa3e90 (excl.)
  • affected from 9caccd41541a6f7d6279928d9f971f6642c361af to e187bc02f8fa4226d62814592cf064ee4557c470 (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 5.12 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 5.12 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.6.145 to 6.6.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.12.96 to 6.12.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.39 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.1.4 to 7.1.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.2-rc3 to * (incl.)

References