CVE-2026-43073

CVE-2026-43073

Medium · published May 5, 2026

CVSS v3.1
5.5
EPSS
0%
Percentile
5.1
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

x86-64: rename misleadingly named '__copy_user_nocache()' function

This function was a masterclass in bad naming, for various historical

reasons.

It claimed to be a non-cached user copy. It is literally _neither_ of

those things. It's a specialty memory copy routine that uses

non-temporal stores for the destination (but not the source), and that

does exception handling for both source and destination accesses.

Also note that while it works for unaligned targets, any unaligned parts

(whether at beginning or end) will not use non-temporal stores, since

only words and quadwords can be non-temporal on x86.

The exception handling means that it _can_ be used for user space

accesses, but not on its own - it needs all the normal "start user space

access" logic around it.

But typically the user space access would be the source, not the

non-temporal destination. That was the original intention of this,

where the destination was some fragile persistent memory target that

needed non-temporal stores in order to catch machine check exceptions

synchronously and deal with them gracefully.

Thus that non-descriptive name: one use case was to copy from user space

into a non-cached kernel buffer. However, the existing users are a mix

of that intended use-case, and a couple of random drivers that just did

this as a performance tweak.

Some of those random drivers then actively misused the user copying

version (with STAC/CLAC and all) to do kernel copies without ever even

caring about the exception handling, _just_ for the non-temporal

destination.

Rename it as a first small step to actually make it halfway sane, and

change the prototype to be more normal: it doesn't take a user pointer

unless the caller has done the proper conversion, and the argument size

is the full size_t (it still won't actually copy more than 4GB in one

go, but there's also no reason to silently truncate the size argument in

the caller).

Finally, use this now sanely named function in the NTB code, which

mis-used a user copy version (with STAC/CLAC and all) of this interface

despite it not actually being a user copy at all.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
5.5 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00162 · 5.1th percentile
Published
2026-05-05T20:16Z
Affected products (5)
ProductVersionsFixed in
linux/linux_kernel≥ 4.2.1, < 6.12.836.12.83
linux/linux_kernel≥ 6.13, < 6.18.246.18.24
linux/linux_kernel≥ 6.19, < 6.19.146.19.14
linux/linux_kernel≥ 7.0, < 7.0.17.0.1
linux/linux_kernelall versions—
References (7)
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 05 MAY 15:29Z
    x86-64: rename misleadingly named '__copy_user_nocache()' function
    cvelistv5