CVE-2026-98264

A flaw was found in the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) virtio sound driver in the Linux kernel. During device removal or system suspend operations, virtual queues are deleted before the virtual device is reset, allowing the device to access queue memory buffers after they have been freed. An attacker could exploit this improper cleanup sequence to trigger a use-after-free condition, potentially leading to kernel memory corruption or a Denial of Service (DoS) through a system crash.

ALSA virtio sound can release vring backing memory while the virtio device still has enabled queues because del_vqs does not guarantee that the device is quiesced. The device may continue DMA access after the vring memory is freed, creating a use-after-free condition that can crash the guest kernel or corrupt memory if the released pages are reused. For the CVSS the PR:N value is used in the paranoid score because a malicious or faulty virtio backend can control queue activity without an account or privileges inside the guest. The attack is adjacent to the guest through the virtio device boundary and is not directly network reachable. Impact is at least denial of service and may include confidentiality and integrity impact because DMA can access freed and potentially reallocated kernel memory. This risk is most relevant for untrusted backends, isolated device processes, passthrough devices, or confidential guest threat models.

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.