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io_uring: don't flood a cancelling task with task_work

Written by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5 from the sources below. Verify against them.

—Not rated
Exploited
No known exploitation
Fix
No fix listed
Who is exposed
Not reported
25Pcve.now Index 25 of 100 · methodology v3 · provisional
  • Exploitation?/40Exploitation: unknown (data gap). No CISA SSVC exploitation rating yet
  • Exposure?/25Exposure: unknown (data gap). No advisory context yet
  • Reach20/20Affects Linux kernel (software on nearly every server, desktop or phone)
  • Severity?/10Severity: unknown (data gap). No CVSS score or vendor rating
  • No patch5/5No patch listed yet

What would change the score

  • Would score about 80 if added to CISA KEV
  • Would score about 75 if CISA's SSVC rates exploitation active
  • Would score about 47 if advisories confirm default setups are exposed

CVE-2026-99254 is not in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. No public exploit code is tracked. It affects Linux; no fixed version is listed yet.

Published
Last modified
Published
Not listed in CISA KEV
25/100 · provisional
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub

Summary

The vulnerability affects the Linux kernel's io_uring asynchronous I/O subsystem. It can cause a task that is exiting or running execve() to be flooded with repeated cleanup callbacks, consuming CPU and potentially stalling the process for minutes without any special privileges.

Read the original description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: io_uring: don't flood a cancelling task with task_work io_ring_exit_work() asks each task which has used the ring to remove its tctx node, by task_work, and repeats that until the list is empty. io_tctx_exit_cb() doesn't touch the node while the task is in io_uring_cancel_generic(), which removes all the nodes at its end. So the work item queues the callback again as soon as it has completed, for nothing. That is more than a waste of time. task_work_run() only returns when it finds the list empty. If the rings are released from inside the cancellation, because requests of other rings held the last references to their files, up to 64 work items keep sending callbacks to the one task which is running them. It never finds the list empty, never gets back to the cancellation, the nodes stay, and so it goes on: a task with 60 pairs of rings which poll each other ran 280000 callbacks in 5 seconds, 20 seconds after exit_group(). It ends when all the senders happen to be late at the same time. Until then the task keeps a CPU and the work items busy. An exiting task can't be killed meanwhile. execve() cancels the requests in the same way, so a live task can get stuck there as well, for minutes. If it takes more than five, the work items run into the WARN_ON_ONCE(time_after(jiffies, timeout)) of io_ring_exit_work(). No privilege is needed for any of this. If the callback has met a task in cancellation, wait a little before it is sent again. Nobody has to wake the work item up for that: either the node is gone by then, or it is the turn of the next round.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. First seen by cve.now
  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • Linux Linux

    Version range not reported

  • Linux Linux

    5.12

Evidence 6

  1. Link
  2. Link
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Corrections

None so far.

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FAQ

Questions about CVE-2026-99254

Is CVE-2026-99254 being exploited?

It is not in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, and CISA's SSVC assessment does not mark exploitation as active. That does not mean it has not been attacked: vendors and researchers can report attacks before CISA lists them. No public exploit code is tracked.Source: cve.now feed data

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-99254?

Linux: version 5.12.Source: cve.now feed data