From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: AL-KERNEL To: kernel-cve@kernelcve.org Subject: [CVE-2026-98411][LOW] power: sequencing: fix NULL-pointer dereference in pwrseq_device_register() Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2026 21:03:33 -0400 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-AL-KERNEL-CVE: CVE-2026-98411 X-AL-KERNEL-Priority: LOW X-AL-KERNEL-Severity: LOW X-AL-KERNEL-Base-Severity: LOW X-AL-KERNEL-KPANIC: NO X-AL-KERNEL-ActionableScore: 1 X-AL-KERNEL-ActionableScore-Lower: unknown X-AL-KERNEL-Commit: a2fb51ec8920279e9e908010f37b448775f42eff List-Id: CVE: CVE-2026-98411 Priority: LOW AL-KERNEL base severity: LOW KPANIC flag: NO Patch: power: sequencing: fix NULL-pointer dereference in pwrseq_device_register() Commit: a2fb51ec8920279e9e908010f37b448775f42eff Upstream patch: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=a2fb51ec8920279e9e908010f37b448775f42eff Original CVE announcement: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2026-98411 Analysis date: Sun, 25 Oct 2026 21:03:33 -0400 ActionableScore: 1 ActionableScore lower bound: unknown Actionable bucket: Ordinary Moderate Manual review required: NO Summary: A rare registration failure can invoke release with an uninitialized targets list and cause an invalid-pointer dereference and possible kernel crash. ====================================================================== ABOUT THIS REPORT ====================================================================== The original Linux kernel CVE announcement for CVE-2026-98411 is available here: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2026-98411 The original announcement does not normally provide a security severity estimate, CVSS assessment, or enough information to determine whether the reported kernel bug represents a practically relevant security issue. This report was generated by AL-KERNEL, an AI-assisted Linux kernel vulnerability analysis system developed by Alexander Larkin. It combines an autonomous classifier with LLM-assisted technical analysis and a separate ActionableScore mechanism. The purpose of this report is to prioritize Linux kernel CVEs before manual review, identify cases that require prompt investigation, and support automatic closure of issues that are unlikely to have meaningful security impact. Published priority for this report: LOW Manual review required: NO A detailed explanation of the methodology and priority rules is included at the end of this message. ====================================================================== AL-KERNEL CLASSIFICATION RESULT ====================================================================== CVE-2026-98411 LOW https://www.kernelcve.org/list/?q=CVE-2026-98411 CHECK WITH IMPACT FROM ORIG NN LOW | AEGIS IMPACT LOW AEGIS_AS=1 LEGACY=LOW RESULT=SAME (final reconciliation agrees; DECISION: both LOW) Maybe valid. Check manually. Hints by AL-KERNEL: The best (paranoid) CVSS is 'AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H';CWE-665;**CWE-476;CWE-703;Other CVSS 'AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L';BEST CVSS score: '4.1';DESCR 'This is an initialization order bug in pwrseq_device_register. If dev_set_name fails before the targets list head is initialized, the release callback can iterate the invalid list and dereference an invalid pointer. The demonstrated primitive is an invalid pointer dereference with possible kernel oops or panic, not UAF or a controlled memory write. For the CVSS the PR:H value is used because reliable triggering requires access to a privileged or kernel controlled power sequencing device registration path and a dev_set_name failure. AC:H reflects the unusual error condition and the lack of direct attacker control. The issue is not network reachable and there is no supported confidentiality or integrity impact. Automated impact decision path. The original SimpleNet classifier selected LOW. The primary LLM estimated paranoid CVSS 4.1 and the production ActionableScore returned 1 with recommendation Ordinary Moderate. The production rules then evaluated CVSS thresholds and ActionableScore thresholds. No severity changing production threshold or specialist override was recorded. The legacy KP specialist has no review artifact for this run. The legacy FD or DH downgrade specialist has no review artifact for this run. The independent weaker Aegis shadow evaluated CVSS 1.6 and ActionableScore 1 with primitive class CLASS_C and manual review REQUIRED. Its independently reconciled impact was LOW. The shadow agreed with the final production impact and aggregation did not change that impact. The final reported impact is LOW.';NO MANUAL CHECK; ,and ActionableScore result is Ordinary Moderate (with actual score 1) MAYBE SIMPLEFIX HARDWARE LINUS - - checked ====================================================================== ACTIONABLESCORE ANALYSIS ====================================================================== ActionableScore=1 PrimitiveClass=CLASS_C RealUAF=NO HostAdminRequired=UNKNOWN NamespaceScopedPrivilege=UNKNOWN ImportantCandidate=NO ManualReview=NO AutoDowngradeAllowed=YES RequiresHostUID0=UNKNOWN AuthorizationDecisionBypass=NO ProtectedResourceImpact=NONE B4PendingReview=NO B4PendingConfirmed=NO 1. ActionableScore * Raw base score: 1. * Conservative score: 1; no floor or cap applied. * Raw paranoid score: 1. * Paranoid score: 1; no defensible stronger primitive is shown. * Final recommended bucket: **Ordinary Moderate**:: 2. Signal breakdown * +1 Reliable kernel crash/DoS: `dev_set_name()` failure reaches device release before `pwrseq->targets` is initialized, allowing invalid list traversal and a NULL/invalid-pointer dereference. * No UAF, OOB write, repeated release, controlled overwrite, disclosure, or authorization bypass is shown. * No extra availability point: it would duplicate the same possible Oops/panic. * No privilege, race, rarity, or hardware penalty applied because the patch does not establish those restrictions precisely. * B5-R does not apply: there is no retry-accumulated heap OOB write or later consumption of corrupted state. * B3-PENDING does not apply: no shared-backing write exists. 3. Reachability analysis The failure occurs during kernel power-sequencing device registration and additionally requires `dev_set_name()` to fail. No userspace interface, namespace capability path, attacker-controlled allocation-failure mechanism, or complete below-host-admin trigger is supplied. The legacy PR:H/AC:H assessment is plausible operationally, but the patch alone does not prove host-admin-only reachability; therefore privilege remains unknown rather than positively host-admin-required. No race is shown. 4. Primitive and severity reading The exact primitive is traversal of an uninitialized list head during release, leading to an invalid-pointer dereference. This is initialization/error-unwind behavior, not a real post-lifetime use or controlled state corruption. The shown impact is a possible kernel Oops/panic; stronger memory corruption or integrity impact is unsupported. It is therefore CLASS_C, not an Important candidate, and ordinary downgrade is safe. 5. One-sentence report phrase A rare registration failure can invoke release with an uninitialized targets list and cause an invalid-pointer dereference and possible kernel crash. 6. Manual review advice NO MANUAL CHECK NEEDED The patch supports only a constrained error-path crash with no attacker-reachable corruption or authorization primitive. 7. Call-site confidence Call-site confidence: medium ====================================================================== UPSTREAM PATCH SUMMARY ====================================================================== Patch: power: sequencing: fix NULL-pointer dereference in pwrseq_device_register() Commit: a2fb51ec8920279e9e908010f37b448775f42eff Upstream URL: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=a2fb51ec8920279e9e908010f37b448775f42eff Commit description: If dev_set_name() fails in pwrseq_device_register(), we jump to the err_put_pwrseq label before initializing pwrseq->targets. pwrseq_release() will try to iterate over targets unconditionally and subsequently dereference an invalid pointer. Move the call to dev_set_name() after the list head is initialized. Fixes: 249ebf3 ("power: sequencing: implement the pwrseq core") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Reported-by: sashiko-bot Closes: https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260903-pwrseq-kunit-v1-0-1f893d2cabc2%40oss.qualcomm.com?part=2 Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260909-pwrseq-kunit-v2-3-ef496afc89d2@oss.qualcomm.com Signed-off-by: Bartosz Golaszewski Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman Changed files: drivers/power/sequencing/core.c Diff excerpt: Not included in this email. See the upstream URL for the full patch. Full patch: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=a2fb51ec8920279e9e908010f37b448775f42eff ====================================================================== DETAILED REPORT METHODOLOGY ====================================================================== The original Linux kernel CVE announcement for CVE-2026-98411 can be found here: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2026-98411 The original CVE announcement normally does not include a security-level estimate. In particular, it may not contain a CVSS assessment, an impact level, or enough information to determine whether the reported bug is a practically relevant security issue. One purpose of this parallel CVE list is to provide that missing technical and prioritization information. The original goal of the AL-KERNEL project was to prioritize Linux kernel CVE analysis automatically before manual review. The system can also help identify non-security issues that may be suitable for automatic closure. This report was generated by AL-KERNEL, an AI-assisted Linux kernel vulnerability analysis system developed by Alexander Larkin. The first analysis stage combines an autonomous classifier with additional LLM-based analysis. The autonomous classifier runs locally on a CPU and is based on a backpropagation neural network. Together, these mechanisms produce a technical vulnerability description, identify likely weakness types, estimate CVSS severity, and provide input for ActionableScore. Two CVSS estimates are retained because incomplete kernel vulnerability information often permits more than one defensible interpretation: Conservative CVSS vector: AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L The Best / paranoid CVSS vector: AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H The Best / paranoid CVSS score: 4.1 The conservative vector represents a lower-impact interpretation. The Best/paranoid vector intentionally represents a plausible upper-bound interpretation and should not automatically be treated as demonstrated real-world impact. CVSS may also need to be adjusted for a particular Linux deployment, because actual reachability, privileges, enabled kernel configuration, hardware, namespaces, exposed device nodes, and other environmental conditions can differ significantly between systems. A separate ActionableScore mechanism evaluates practical remediation urgency. Its analysis may include reachability, attack prerequisites, subsystem exposure, memory-corruption characteristics, denial-of-service reliability, and possible confidentiality, integrity, or privilege-escalation impact. Conservative ActionableScore: unknown Paranoid ActionableScore: 1 The final base severity is taken directly from the second tab-separated field of the AL-KERNEL classification result. ActionableScore does not replace or independently override that final AL-KERNEL decision, and if ActionableScore adjusted impact level of ALKERNEL, then you would see self-readable flags above like INCREASED_TO_HIGH_BASED_ON_ACTIONABLESCOREHIGHEREQTHAN7. For an AL-KERNEL result of MODERATE, this report uses the following additional presentation split: ActionableScore below 5 -> MODERATE REGULAR ActionableScore 5 or more -> MODERATE 7.0 The distinction between MODERATE REGULAR and MODERATE 7.0 makes it possible to identify Moderate issues that should receive manual analysis and fixes before lower-priority MODERATE REGULAR issues. In many cases, MODERATE REGULAR fixes may wait for a later rebase or routine update. There is one override in which MODERATE REGULAR becomes MODERATE 7.0 even when the ActionableScore is below 5. When the AL-KERNEL result contains the KPANIC flag, a MODERATE result is always presented as MODERATE 7.0. The KPANIC flag selected with few regexps without usage of AI at all, so it helps to detect cases when Kernel Crash happens and similar (to filter False-Negative results from the LLM usage). KPANIC indicates that a reliable kernel crash, kernel panic, or similarly serious kernel availability impact was identified by the classification workflow. AL-KERNEL base severity for this report: LOW KPANIC detected for this report: NO Published priority for this report (same as in Subject): LOW These results are intended to support engineering triage. They are machine-generated estimates, and cases marked for manual review should be validated by a human security engineer before final disposition. For more info read docs linked from here: https://kernelcve.org/ (and you can submit you own patch there to generate such a report for non-existant CVE-id yet). Note that in many cases this AI tool selects higher severity, than real is (means you can expect Importants instead of Moderate 7.0 or Moderates 7.0 instead of regular Moderates). If you see such cases, please use reply email interface to add additional manual analyses info to this particular CVE. And please, please, let me know when you see Lows instead of Importants or Important instead of Low (because particular for such cases I need to tune this AI tool to make it better for this one and next similar). My contact email for such notifications is alexanjelausa@gmail.com (and both send reply to CVE record itself too and see "reply" button below for howto reply).