CVE-2026-98543

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel. A local privileged user could cause a Denial of Service (DoS) or file system corruption due to improper locking in the BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) subsystem. When attaching sleepable BPF programs to certain file removal hooks, the kernel verifier incorrectly assumes an inode lock is held, permitting extended attributes to be modified concurrently without synchronization.

This vulnerability is rated as having a Moderate impact for Red Hat Enterprise Linux because exploitation requires elevated administrative privileges to load custom BPF programs and attach them to kernel security hooks. An attacker must already possess administrative capabilities, such as CAP_BPF or CAP_SYS_ADMIN, to deploy sleepable security probes that manipulate extended attributes during file or directory removal operations. Because unprivileged users cannot trigger this race condition or load the requisite programs by default, the flaw primarily poses a local denial of service or potential filesystem integrity risk in environments where untrusted administrators manage kernel tracing programs.

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.