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Advisory severityMedium5.5Vendor: LowRed Hat Linux

Medium [CVE-2026-68174] Fix union collision of module and refcnt for dynamic events

This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-68174.

Aggregated and source-linked by VulniPulse. Data sources, validation and limitations.

CVE-2026-68174 Source published Source updated

VulniPulse record published Record updated

Affected products & platforms
Red Hat LinuxUnclassified
Open source advisory

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Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: tracing: Fix union collision of module and refcnt for dynamic events In 'struct trace_event_call', the 'module' pointer and the 'refcnt' atomic variable share the same memory space in a union. For dynamic events, the union member is 'refcnt', which acts as an active reference counter.

When a dynamic event (such as kprobe, uprobe, fprobe, eprobe, or wprobe) has a non-zero reference count (e.g. due to active event triggers or perf attachments), its 'call->module' evaluates to a small non-zero integer instead of NULL.

When filtering or setting events for a specific module (e.g., writing ':mod:' to 'set_event'), the code in '__ftrace_set_clr_event_nolock()' and 'update_event_fields()' reads 'call->module' directly without checking whether the event is dynamic.

This causes the kernel to treat the small integer (refcnt) as a 'struct module' pointer, leading to a NULL/invalid pointer dereference (Oops) when dereferencing the module name. Fix this by ensuring that the 'TRACE_EVENT_FL_DYNAMIC' flag is checked before treating 'call->module' as a valid pointer in these code paths.

When handling dynamic events, a memory collision occurs where a reference counter is mistakenly interpreted as a module pointer.

Affected versions

No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.

Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 2 days ago·verify at source

Fixed versions

No fixed release is recorded yet. That does not prove no patch exists — confirm against the vendor advisory.

Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 2 days ago·verify at source

Mitigation

The source record does not include mitigation steps. That is not a statement that no fix exists — read the vendor advisory below for the authoritative guidance.

Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 2 days ago·verify at source

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