CVE-2026-52977

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's futex (Fast Userspace Mutexes) subsystem. A race condition between two concurrent futex operations can lead to a system live lock. This occurs when a task attempting to exit early due to a signal or timeout becomes deadlocked while another task continuously attempts to acquire locks, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) for a local user.

This vulnerability is rated as Moderate severity for Red Hat Enterprise Linux because exploitation requires local unprivileged code execution to trigger the concurrency race and is limited to causing a denial of service via system livelock. The issue resides in the core kernel priority-inheritance futex mechanism, enabling an authenticated local user to induce an unrecoverable busy loop. It does not allow privilege escalation or compromise data confidentiality and integrity, which bounds the overall security impact.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options don't meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.