Junglewise Threat Intelligence

CVE-2026-23229: Linux Kernel race condition in virtio-crypto driver

CVE-2026-23229 · Severity: medium · CVSS 5.5 · Published 2026-02-18

Technologies: Linux Kernel. Vendors: Linux.

Executive brief

A vulnerability in the Linux kernel's virtio-crypto driver can cause virtual machines to hang or crash when performing heavy cryptographic operations. This occurs because the system fails to properly coordinate multiple processes accessing the same hardware acceleration resources. An attacker or a malfunctioning application could exploit this to cause a denial-of-service, disrupting the availability of the affected server or virtual machine.

Technical details

A race condition exists in the Linux kernel's virtio-crypto driver (drivers/crypto/virtio/virtio_crypto_core.c) due to missing synchronization in the virtcrypto_done_task() function. When multiple processes concurrently utilize a virtio-crypto PCI device, the lack of spinlock protection during virtqueue notification handling can lead to data corruption in the virtqueue, manifesting as 'id is not a head' errors and resulting in process hangs. The vulnerability is triggered during high-concurrency cryptographic operations (e.g., openssl benchmarks) in a VM environment. The fix introduces spinlock protection using spin_lock_irqsave and spin_unlock_irqrestore around the virtqueue processing logic to ensure atomic access to the data queue.

Affected products

  • Linux Linux Kernel 4.19.306 to 4.20, 5.4.268 to 5.5, 5.10.209 to 5.10.251, 5.15.148 to 5.15.201, 6.1.75 to 6.1.164, 6.6.14 to 6.6.125, 6.7.2 to 6.12.72, 6.13 to 6.18.11, 6.19 to 6.19.1

Timeline

  • 2026-01-13: other: Patch authored
  • 2026-02-18: disclosed: CVE published
  • 2026-02-18: patched: Fix merged into various stable kernel branches

References

Related threats