CVE-2026-72098: Linux

Critical severity, CVSS 9.8. EPSS: 0.7% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: dm-verity: fix buffer overflow in FEC calculation There's a buffer overflow in dm-verity-fec: if (neras && *neras <= v->fec->roots) fio->erasures[(*neras)++] = i; This allows *neras to reach roots + 1 (the post-increment pushes it past roots). This value is then passed as no_eras to decode_rs8(). Inside the RS decoder (lib/reed_solomon/decode_rs.c:113-121), the erasure locator polynomial loop writes lambda[j] where j can reach nroots + 1 — one element past the end of lambda[] (which is sized nroots + 1, valid indices 0..nroots). The out-of-bounds write lands on syn[0], corrupting the syndrome buffer.

Affected products

• Linux Linux: from 4.5, before 6.18.42 (fixed in 6.18.42); from 6.19, before 7.1.5 (fixed in 7.1.5)

Published 2026-08-15. Last modified 2026-08-17.