Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2026-90586

high Nessus Plugin ID 379176

Synopsis

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed with a vulnerability that the vendor indicates will not be patched.

Description

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

- The Xtensa MMU userspace port never initialized the per-thread page-table pointer thread->arch.ptables during thread setup, while arch_mem_domain_thread_add() in arch/xtensa/core/ptables.c uses a non-NULL value of that field as its this thread is migrating from another memory domain predicate. For a thread whose struct k_thread backing memory is not zeroed, the field holds stale data and the kernel takes the migration branch, passing that stale value to reset_region() as the base of a level-1 page table. The equivalent field on x86 is explicitly cleared in z_x86_userspace_prepare_thread() for exactly this reason;
the Xtensa port adopted the predicate without the initialization. The condition is reachable from an unprivileged user-mode thread on a build with CONFIG_XTENSA_MMU, CONFIG_USERSPACE and dynamically allocated kernel objects. k_object_alloc(K_OBJ_THREAD) is a system call and allocates the thread object from the caller's resource pool without zeroing it, and the k_thread_create() verifier accepts such an object while forcing the K_USER option, so the migration branch is taken whenever the recycled heap bytes at that offset are non-zero. Because a user thread can also allocate, fill and free other kernel objects from the same heap, the stale bytes are groomable rather than merely random. Walking the bogus table in region_map_update() performs an unguarded index into l2_page_tables_counter[], may copy from and write through the attacker-influenceable level-1 base in dup_l2_table_if_needed(), and finally writes a page- table entry through a second pointer read out of that memory once per page of the new thread's stack.
The result is out-of-bounds reads and writes executed in supervisor mode, ranging from an immediate kernel panic (observed as Xtensa EXCAUSE 13 on Intel ADSP DSP firmware with user threads) to corruption of kernel memory and escape from the user-mode sandbox. (CVE-2026-90586)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

Solution

There is no known solution at this time.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 379176

File Name: unpatched_CVE_2026_90586.nasl

Version: 1.2

Type: Local

Agent: unix

Family: Misc.

Published: 11/11/2026

Updated: 11/13/2026

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Nessus Agent, Tenable Cloud Security, Tenable Self-Hosted Container Security, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 4.9

Percentile: 58.6

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.8

Temporal Score: 5.8

Vector: CVSS2#AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:C/I:C/A:C

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2026-90586

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 7.1

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:U/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:16.04:-:lts, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:18.04:-:lts, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:20.04:-:lts, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:22.04:-:lts, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:24.04:-:lts, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:26.04:-:lts, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:26.10, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:zephyr

Required KB Items: Host/cpu, Host/local_checks_enabled, global_settings/vendor_unpatched, Host/OS/identifier

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Vulnerability Publication Date: 11/9/2026

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2026-90586

Detections

Analytics