CVE intelligence

CVE-2026-72368

Vulnerability intelligence

Published Aug 15, 2026Sources checked Oct 8, 2026

7.8HIGHCVSS out of 10

What this means

Review the available evidence

CVE-2026-72368 and is rated High severity with a CVSS score of 7.8. It is not in the current CISA KEV record we collected. That does not prove exploitation has not occurred.

CISA KEVNot listedBased on the latest collected catalog

EPSS0.2%Estimated 30-day exploitation probability

Ransomware useNot markedCISA KEV ransomware field

Threat actors0Source-linked actor relationships

Overview

What is CVE-2026-72368?

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

cachefiles: Fix double unlock in nomem_d_alloc error path

When start_creating() fails and returns -ENOMEM, it has already released the parent directory lock in __start_dirop():

static struct dentry *__start_dirop(...) { ... inode_lock_nested(dir, I_MUTEX_PARENT); dentry = lookup_one_qstr_excl(name, parent, lookup_flags); if (IS_ERR(dentry)) inode_unlock(dir); <-- Lock released on error return dentry; }

However, the nomem_d_alloc error path in cachefiles_get_directory() unconditionally calls inode_unlock(d_inode(dir)) again, causing a double unlock that corrupts the rwsem state.

This is a leftover from commit 7ab96df840e60 which replaced manual locking with start_creating() but failed to update the nomem_d_alloc path (while correctly updating mkdir_error and lookup_error paths).

Source: NVD