Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98551
Go to dashboardOn arm64, the perf subsystem fills branch-stack records without clearing two fields, so some records sent to userspace hold leftover kernel heap data. An attacker with access to perf sampling could read that residual memory.
Summary written from the sources below. Check the originals before acting.
First seen by InfraStack 2026-10-23 21:57 UTC. All times on this page are UTC.
Only arm64 systems with BRBE branch recording are affected, because only the arm_pmuv3 driver writes these fields. x86 kernels are not affected. Systems where unprivileged users cannot run perf sampling have a much smaller exposure.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
uname -r and compare against the kernel version that carries the upstream fix (unknown from sources)uname -m returns aarch64cat /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoidsysctl -w kernel.perf_event_paranoid=3Each row is the first time that source carried this signal. The analyst’s rows are its own findings.
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
perf/core: Fill branch entries with a single assignment
perf_clear_branch_entry_bitfields() clears the bitfields of struct perf_branch_entry one by one and leaves from/to alone, since callers overwrite those straight away. The list has to be kept in sync with the struct by hand and has already fallen behind: new_type and priv were added to perf_branch_entry and never added here.
Only BRBE writes those two, and neither for every record. brbe_set_perf_entry_type() leaves new_type alone for a branch type it does not recognise, and priv is not set for source-only records. arm_pmuv3.c allocates the per-CPU branch stack with kmalloc(), so such a record reaches userspace with whatever the slot held: uninitialised kmalloc() data on the first pass over the buffer, the previous record's values after that. Nothing under arch/x86/events/ writes either field, so only arm64 is affected.
Assign the whole entry at each site instead. Everything not named is then zero, and there is no list to keep in sync. The bitfields add up to exactly 64 bits, so the struct has no padding to leave undefined.
perf_clear_branch_entry_bitfields() has no callers left, so remove it. perf_entry_from_brbe_regset() assigns an empty literal instead, since it fills from/to conditionally. PERF_BR_SPEC_NA is 0, so dropping the explicit spec assignment changes nothing.
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