In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: reboot: fix cad_pid use-after-free race cad_pid is a single kernel-wide struct pid pointer

Overview

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

reboot: fix cad_pid use-after-free race

cad_pid is a single kernel-wide struct pid pointer. proc_do_cad_pid() reads it and passes it to pid_vnr() without protecting the lifetime of the referenced struct pid. A concurrent writer can replace cad_pid and drop the final reference to the old struct pid after the reader has loaded the pointer but before pid_vnr() has finished dereferencing it, causing a use-after-free.

kill_cad_pid() has the same lifetime race when it passes cad_pid to kill_pid().

At the time this issue was reported, an unprivileged user could reach the sysctl through user and PID namespaces because cad_pid was registered in pid_table[]. Moving cad_pid back to the global reboot sysctl table corrected that namespace and permission mismatch, but did not fix the underlying lifetime race.

Fix this by treating cad_pid as an RCU-protected pointer at both read sites and by waiting for a grace period before dropping the old reference on the write side.

call_rcu(&old_pid->rcu, ...) cannot be used here because free_pid() also queues pid->rcu; queueing the same rcu_head twice can corrupt the RCU callback list.

Original KASAN crash stack: kernel/pid.c:545 pid_nr_ns() # reads freed pid->level kernel/pid.c:556 pid_vnr() # calls pid_nr_ns() kernel/pid.c:775 proc_do_cad_pid() # calls pid_vnr(cad_pid)

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.

Vendor advisories

• Red Hat VEX · Moderate · affected: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 · no fix planned: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, … · updated 2026-10-23 · vex