Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-99120
Go to dashboardWhen Hyper-V runs as a guest under KVM on AMD, nested page fault error codes can carry an unexpected SS bit, which causes out-of-bounds array accesses in the KVM MMU code. The result is a kernel WARN or UBSAN report, and the sources do not describe any attacker-controlled code execution.
Summary written from the sources below. Check the originals before acting.
First seen by InfraStack 2026-10-28 11:32 UTC. All times on this page are UTC.
Hosts running KVM on AMD processors that run nested guests, particularly Hyper-V on Windows 11 as an L1 guest, are the reported case. The sources say the SS bit appears in nested page faults with shadowed NPT and that the bug was triggered with gmet=0 as well. Teams that do not run KVM on AMD with nested virtualization can skip it.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
grep -m1 'model name' /proc/cpuinfo and lsmod | grep kvm_amd.UBSAN: array-index-out-of-bounds or WARN traces in arch/x86/kvm/mmu.h with dmesg | grep -i kvm.uname -r against the fixed kernel version, which the sources do not state: unknown.Each 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:
KVM: x86/mmu: Cope with the SS bit being set in #NPF exit codes
When running Hyper-V from Windows 11, KVM is seeing the SS bit set in nested page fault error codes produced for shadowed NPT. The AMD manual is unclear about when SS is set, including whether it can be set when SupervisorShadowStackEn (bit 6) is not set in the MISC_CTL field of the VMCB.
Nevertheless, the unexpected SS bit causes out of bounds accesses in permission_fault(), seen as either WARNs or UBSAN reports:
kernel: UBSAN: array-index-out-of-bounds in arch/x86/kvm/mmu.h:225:27 kernel: index 34 is out of range for type 'u16 [16]'
(in this case, the page fault error code is 34*2=0x44, i.e. SS|U; the report shows SS|U|W happening as well). Fix the handling of unknown error codes by dropping SS and (with a WARN) any bits not among those that permission_fault() expects to receive.
At the same time, given the uncertainty about when hardware sets SS, follow the processor's behavior when constructing the fault's error code, and preserve the SS bit as passed to FNAME(walk_addr_generic). While the behavior is surprising, there's a possibility that Hyper-V expects it (Hyper-V does not even enable CET unless it finds MBEC/GMET!), so retain the information when reflecting the fault to L1 instead of unconditionally discarding it.
Bisection shows that this started happening with commit 687ee95c1b6d ("KVM: nSVM: enable GMET for guests"), even though SHSTK was available to guests since Linux 6.18. However, this is not because bit 1 of MISC_CTL (GMET) somehow enables reporting the SS bit; rather, it's simply that Hyper-V never uses CET unless GMET is also present. The WARN is reproducible even with gmet=0, with some hacking of kvm-unit-tests's cet.c testcase to ensure that the first access to the shadow stack triggers a page fault.
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