Details have emerged about a new, unpatched local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability impacting the Linux kernel.
Dubbed Dirty Frag, it has been described as a successor to Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431, CVSS score: 7.8), a recently disclosed LPE flaw impacting the Linux kernel that has since come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability was reported to Linux kernel maintainers on April 30, 2026.
"Dirty Frag is a vulnerability (class) that achieves root privileges on most Linux distributions by chaining the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability and the RxRPC Page-Cache Write vulnerability," security researcher Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel) said in a write-up.
"Dirty Frag is a case that extends the bug class to which Dirty Pipe and Copy Fail belong. Because it is a deterministic logic bug that does not depend on a timing window, no race condition is required, the kernel does not panic when the exploit fails, and the success rate is very high."
Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an unprivileged local user to gain elevated root access on most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 24.04.4, RHEL 10.1, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CentOS Stream 10, AlmaLinux 10, and Fedora 44.
According to the researcher, the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability was introduced in a source code commit made in January 2017, while the RxRPC Page-Cache Write vulnerability was introduced in June 2023. Interestingly, the same January 17, 2017, commit was the root cause behind another buffer overflow (CVE-2022-27666, CVSS score: 7.8) that affected various Linux distributions.
xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write, which is rooted in the IPSec (xfrm) subsystem, provides attackers with a 4-byte store primitive like Copy Fail and overwrites a small amount in the kernel's page cache.
However, the exploit requires the unprivileged user to create a namespace, a step that's blocked by Ubuntu through AppArmor. In such an environment, xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write cannot be triggered. That's where the second exploit, RxRPC Page-Cache Write, comes in.
"RxRPC Page-Cache Write does not require the privilege to create a namespace, but the rxrpc.ko module itself is not included in most distributions," Kim explained. "For example, the default build of RHEL 10.1 does not ship rxrpc.ko. However, on Ubuntu, the rxrpc.ko module is loaded by default."
"Chaining the two variants makes the blind spots cover each other. In an environment where user namespace creation is allowed, the ESP exploit runs first. Conversely, on Ubuntu, where user namespace creation is blocked but rxrpc.ko is built, the RxRPC exploit works."
CloudLinx, in an advisory of its own, said the flaw resides in the "ESP-in-UDP MSG_SPLICE_PAGES no-COW fast path and is reachable via the XFRM user netlink interface."
"The bug lives in the in-place decryption fast paths of esp4, esp6, and rxrpc: when a socket buffer carries paged fragments that are not privately owned by the kernel (e.g., pipe pages attached via splice(2)/sendfile(2)/MSG_SPLICE_PAGES), the receive path decrypts directly over those externally-backed pages, exposing or corrupting plaintext that an unprivileged process still holds a reference to," AlmaLinux said.
Adding to the urgency is the release of a working proof-of-concept (PoC) that can be exploited to gain root in a single command. Until the patches are available, it's advised to blocklist esp4, esp6, and rxrpc modules so they cannot be loaded -
sudo sh -c "printf 'install esp4 /bin/false\ninstall esp6 /bin/false\ninstall rxrpc /bin/false\n' > /etc/modprobe.d/dirtyfrag.conf; rmmod esp4 esp6 rxrpc 2>/dev/null; true"
It's worth mentioning here that Dirty Frag, despite sharing some overlaps with Copy Fail, can be exploited irrespective of whether the Linux kernel's algif_aead module is enabled or not.
"Note that Dirty Frag can be triggered regardless of whether the algif_aead module is available," the researcher said. "In other words, even on systems where the publicly known Copy Fail mitigation (algif_aead blacklist) is applied, your Linux is still vulnerable to Dirty Frag."
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