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io_uring/io-wq: don't hide a link from cancellations

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-2026-99255 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 Linux kernel's io_uring subsystem, specifically its io-wq worker code, is affected. A race in how linked requests are handed between kernel worker threads can let a task that is exiting miss a pending request, so the task can hang during exit and the process may become impossible to kill.

Read the original description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: io_uring/io-wq: don't hide a link from cancellations A task that exits cancels its tracked requests and waits until they are gone. io_uring_cancel_generic() looks everywhere a request can be, and goes to sleep if it found nothing to cancel. It is woken up each time one of the requests of the task is completed by task work or freed. When io-wq is done with a request that has a link, there is a time in which the next request of the link can't be found: io_worker_handle_work() io_assign_current_work(worker, NULL) io_wq_free_work(work) io_req_find_next() // takes the link off the request io_free_req() // task work for the task io_assign_current_work(worker, linked) io_run_task_work() cond_resched() worker->cur_work = linked It is not pending, it is not the current work of a worker, and it is not yet on the list that it is about to be parked on. If the pass that the exiting task makes because of io_free_req() falls into that time, it finds nothing and the task goes to sleep. The worker then runs the link, which IO_WQ_BIT_EXIT doesn't prevent for bounded work. If that parks the request nothing is completed or freed, and nobody wakes up the task. If it is the process that exits it can't be killed any more either. NOP, IOSQE_ASYNC | IOSQE_IO_LINK FUTEX_WAIT, FUTEX2_PRIVATE exit of the thread, or of the process, up to 63us later With four of these per round 5 to 8 of 10,000 rounds hang (4 CPUs, KVM): io_uring_cancel_generic do_exit Commit f8b632e89a10 ("io_uring: tighten task exit cancellations") is about the same gap, and makes the task look again for whatever happens before io_free_req(). Free the request once the link is the current work of the worker, or pending. Whoever is woken up by that can find the link, until it is parked where cancellations look as well. To do so split io_wq_free_work() in two.

Timeline

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

Affected versions

  • Linux Linux

    Version range not reported

  • Linux Linux

    5.5

Evidence 6

  1. Link
  2. Link
  3. Link
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Corrections

None so far.

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FAQ

Questions about CVE-2026-99255

Is CVE-2026-99255 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-2026-99255?

Linux: version 5.5.Source: cve.now feed data