CVE-2026-45915: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: fat: avoid parent link count underflow in rmdir Corrupted FAT images can leave a directory inode with an incorrect i_nlink (e.g. 2 even though subdirectories exist). rmdir then unconditionally calls drop_nlink(dir) and can drive i_nlink to 0, triggering the WARN_ON in drop_nlink(). Add a sanity check in vfat_rmdir() and msdos_rmdir(): only drop the parent link count when it is at least 3, otherwise report a filesystem error.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 2.6.19, before 5.10.252 (fixed in 5.10.252); from 5.11, before 5.15.202 (fixed in 5.15.202); from 5.16, before 6.1.165 (fixed in 6.1.165); from 6.2, before 6.6.128 (fixed in 6.6.128); from 6.7, before 6.12.75 (fixed in 6.12.75); from 6.13, before 6.18.14 (fixed in 6.18.14); …

Published 2026-05-27. Last modified 2026-06-24.