CVE-2026-46063: x86/shstk: Prevent deadlock during shstk sigreturn

Published May 27, 2026
·
Updated

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

x86/shstk: Prevent deadlock during shstk sigreturn

During sigreturn the shadow stack signal frame is popped. The kernel does this by reading the shadow stack using normal read accesses. When it can't assume the memory is shadow stack, it takes extra steps to makes sure it is reading actual shadow stack memory and not other normal readable memory. It does this by holding the mmap read lock while doing the access and checking the flags of the VMA.

Unfortunately that is not safe. If the read of the shadow stack sigframe hits a page fault, the fault handler will try to recursively grab another mmap read lock. This normally works ok, but if a writer on another CPU is also waiting, the second read lock could fail and cause a deadlock.

Fix this by not holding mmap lock during the read access to userspace.

Instead use mmaplockspeculate...() to watch for changes between dropping mmap lock and the userspace access. Retry if anything grabbed an mmap write lock in between and could have changed the VMA.

These mmaplockspeculate...() helpers use mm::mmlockseq, which is only available when PERVMALOCK is configured. So make X86USERSHADOWSTACK depend on it. On x86, PERVMALOCK is a default configuration for SMP kernels. So drop support for the other configs under the assumption that the !SMP shadow stack user base does not exist.

Currently there is a check that skips the lookup work when the SSP can be assumed to be on a shadow stack. While reorganizing the function, remove the optimization to make the tricky code flows more common, such that issues like this cannot escape detection for so long.

Affected Software

6 affected componentsFixes available
Linux Linux kernel
Linux Linux kernel>=6.6<6.6.140
Linux Linux kernel>=6.7<6.12.88
Linux Linux kernel>=6.13<6.18.27
Linux Linux kernel>=6.19<7.0.4
Microsoft azl3 kernel 6.6.139.1-1<6.6.141.1-1
6.6.141.1-1

Remediation

Recommended actions to resolve this vulnerability, in priority order.

  1. Upgrade

    Upgrade to a fixed release to a version that resolves this vulnerability.

    Fixed in 6.6.141.1-1

Event History

May 27, 2026
CVE Published
via MITRE·12:57 PM
Data Sourced
via MITRE·12:57 PM
Description
Data Sourced
via NVD·02:17 PM
RemedyDescriptionSeverityWeaknessAffected Software
May 28, 2026
Data Sourced
via Microsoft·08:10 AM
DescriptionSeverityWeakness
Data Sourced
via Microsoft·08:10 AM
Affected Software
Updated
via Microsoft·08:10 AM
DescriptionSeverity

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