In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/pagealloc: clear page->private in freepages_prepare()
Several subsystems (slub, shmem, ttm, etc.) use page->private but don't clear it before freeing pages. When these pages are later allocated as high-order pages and split via split_page(), tail pages retain stale page->private values.
This causes a use-after-free in the swap subsystem. The swap code uses page->private to track swap count continuations, assuming freshly allocated pages have page->private == 0. When stale values are present, swapcountcontinued() incorrectly assumes the continuation list is valid and iterates over uninitialized page->lru containing LIST_POISON values, causing a crash:
KASAN: maybe wild-memory-access in range [0xdead000000000100-0xdead000000000107] RIP: 0010:__dosysswapoff+0x1151/0x1860
Fix this by clearing page->private in freepagesprepare(), ensuring all freed pages have clean state regardless of previous use.
{
"cna_assigner": "Linux",
"osv_generated_from": "https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/tree/main/cves/2026/43xxx/CVE-2026-43303.json"
}