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AppArmor privileged policy management confused deputy in Linux kernel

IdentifiersCVE-2026-23268CWE-Confused Deputy

CVE-2026-23268 is a local privilege-boundary flaw in the Linux kernel AppArmor subsystem. An unprivileged local user can open writable apparmorfs policy-management interfaces and then abuse a confused deputy condition by passing the opened file descriptor to a privileged process and inducing that process to perform the write. Because the write-side privilege validation was insufficient for this delegated file descriptor case, the attacker could cause privileged policy operations through apparmorfs, including loading, replacing, and removing AppArmor profiles. The issue specifically affects AppArmor policy management rather than a generic VFS permission bypass. Upstream fixed it by ensuring that the task writing to the interface has privileges that are a subset of the task that originally opened the interface, closing the delegation path that allowed unconfined processes to bypass the usual policy checks.

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ANALYST BRIEF

Impact, mitigation & remediation

What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.

Impact

What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.

Successful exploitation gives an unprivileged local attacker effective privileged AppArmor policy-management capability. This can be used to remove or weaken confinement, replace existing profiles, load attacker-controlled policy, or remove profiles entirely. The resulting impact includes bypass of AppArmor-enforced restrictions, denial of service by denying execution for system or target applications, bypass of unprivileged user namespace restrictions, and creation of conditions that can facilitate subsequent local privilege escalation chains, including exploitation of other kernel bugs from a less constrained execution context.

Mitigation

If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.

If immediate patching is not possible, reduce exposure by preventing untrusted users from influencing privileged processes that may write to apparmorfs policy-management interfaces, and restrict or disable workflows that delegate AppArmor policy loading through privileged helpers. In containerized environments where AppArmor policy namespaces are enabled, setting the sysctl unprivileged_userns_apparmor_policy=false is documented as a mitigation for the related container attack path by preventing root in the user namespace/container from loading policy into the namespace. These are mitigations only; kernel patching is the definitive fix.

Remediation

Patch, then assume compromise.

Apply a Linux kernel update that includes the upstream AppArmor fix for CVE-2026-23268. The fix changes AppArmor policy-interface handling so that writes are only permitted when the writing task's privileges are a subset of those of the task that opened the apparmorfs interface. Vendor kernel updates from SUSE and upstream stable kernels include this remediation; deploy the appropriate patched kernel for the affected distribution and reboot into the updated kernel.
PUBLIC EXPLOITS

Exploits

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VALID 0 / 0 TOTALView more in app

No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.

EXPOSURE SURFACE

Affected products & vendors

Products and vendors Mallory has correlated with this vulnerability. Open in Mallory to drill down to specific CPE configurations and version ranges.

VendorProductType
ApparmorApparmorapplication
CanonicalUbuntuoperating_system
LinuxLinux Kerneloperating_system

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Threat actor evidence

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Associated malware

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Detection signatures

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