High · published August 22, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
perf/core: Fix group leader use-after-free after sibling detach
perf_group_detach() handles leader and sibling detach differently. When the
group leader is detached, all siblings are promoted to singleton events and
their group_leader pointer is reset to themselves. When a sibling is
detached, it is removed from the leader's sibling_list, but its
group_leader pointer is left pointing at the old leader.
That is harmless when the sibling is being closed and freed immediately, as
in the DETACH_DEAD path. It is not safe when the sibling is detached but
kept alive, such as during CPU hotplug with DETACH_GROUP. In that case the
sibling is removed from the context, while its file descriptor can still
keep it alive.
A typical failing sequence is:
- A group contains leader L and sibling S.
- CPU hot-unplug detaches S with DETACH_GROUP, removing it from
L->sibling_list but leaving S->group_leader == L.
- L is later closed and freed.
- A PERF_IOC_FLAG_GROUP ioctl on S follows S->group_leader and
dereferences the freed leader.
This was reproduced by running the perf event fuzzer, CPU hotplug, and a
stress workload concurrently:
Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 006b6b6b6b6b6cdb
CPU: 2 PID: 12489 Comm: perf_fuzzer 6.18.7 PREEMPT
pc : perf_ioctl+0x34c/0xc68
x20: ffffff89a3fa2c70 x8 : 6b6b6b6b6b6b6b6b
Code: 943c4a0e 340047a0 f9404a94 f9411e88 (f940b908)
Call trace:
perf_ioctl+0x34c/0xc68 (P)
__arm64_sys_ioctl+0xa0/0xf4
invoke_syscall+0x58/0xe4
el0_svc_common+0xa8/0xdc
do_el0_svc+0x1c/0x28
el0_svc+0x40/0xc0
el0t_64_sync_handler+0x68/0xdc
el0t_64_sync+0x1c4/0x1c8
The fault happened in perf_ioctl(), where perf_event_for_each() follows
the stale group_leader pointer and perf_event_for_each_child() then
dereferences the freed leader's context.
Fix the use-after-free by promoting the detached sibling to a singleton.
Also fix __event_disable() cgroup accounting and event state change.