CVE-2026-97876 PUBLISHED

Bypass of GRUB lockdown restriction in Secure Boot mode via serial command MMIO base address

Assigner: canonical
Reserved: 25.09.2026 Published: 02.10.2026 Updated: 02.10.2026

A local attacker with control over GRUB's configuration can bypass lockdown restrictions when booting with Secure Boot and load an unsigned GRUB module, while GRUB continues to report lockdown is enabled.

The vulnerability is caused by insufficient validation of the MMIO base address passed to the GRUB serial command. GRUB does not validate that the base address corresponds to a UART device, rather than being an arbitrary memory address. This allows an attacker to trick GRUB into writing non-arbitrary data at an attacker-controlled address, including resetting the grub_file_verifiers list in a way that disables the subsequent verification of loaded modules.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS Score: 6.4

Product Status

Vendor GNU
Product grub2
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 2.12 to 2.16 (excl.)

Credits

  • Leïth Essid reporter
  • Andrew Hamilton remediation developer

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-822 Untrusted pointer dereference CWE