Microsoft Security Response Center guidance
Vendor revision: Oct 21, 2026Release Notes
Vendor-listed releases
- 6.6.158.1-1
Vulnerability intelligence
CVE-2026-98116 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.
Release Notes
Vendor-listed releases
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
ALSA: pcm: Serialize PCM mmap with buffer reallocation to fix page UAF
snd_pcm_hw_params() and snd_pcm_hw_free() guard buffer reallocation with an mmap_count check performed under the PCM stream lock, but the lock is released long before the buffer is actually freed: snd_pcm_sync_stop(), constraint refinement and do_free_pages() all happen in between. snd_pcm_mmap_data(), on the other hand, takes no lock at all: it validates against the old buffer's state and dma_bytes, remaps its pages into the VMA, and only then increments mmap_count.
A concurrent mmap() can therefore slip in between the check and the free. remap_pfn_range() installs writable PTEs for the old buffer's pages without taking page references, and the subsequent do_free_pages() returns those pages to the page allocator while the VMA still maps them. This leaves a stale, writable mapping of freed pages: a page-level use-after-free that can be leveraged for local privilege escalation.
Make snd_pcm_mmap_data() participate in the buffer-access scheme introduced for hw_params/hw_free: acquire runtime->buffer_accessing before validating and remapping, and release it afterwards.
Buffer reallocation already fails with -EBUSY while accessors are active, and the mmap side now fails with -EBUSY while a reallocation is in progress, so the validate/remap sequence and the check/free sequence can no longer interleave.
A reproducer that turns this race into a stale writable mapping of the freed DMA buffer pages is available on request.
Source: NVD