CVE-2026-99238

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's tracing subsystem. A local attacker could exploit this vulnerability to achieve privilege escalation or cause a Denial of Service (DoS) by crashing the system. The issue is caused by a race condition where module records are updated without acquiring the proper lock during module loading or unloading. This missing synchronization allows a concurrently removed tracing instance to be accessed after being freed, resulting in a use-after-free condition.

This vulnerability is rated as Important severity because an attacker with local access who can manage tracing instances can exploit a race condition during dynamic module events to trigger memory corruption, potentially escalating privileges to the kernel level or causing a system crash. In standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments, access to the tracefs hierarchy is restricted to privileged administrators by default, which substantially limits the exposure to non-root users. The flaw specifically requires write permissions to create and delete directory structures within the tracing instances pseudo-filesystem.

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.