CVE-2026-98053

A moderate out-of-bounds read flaw was found in the Linux kernel's Intel Audio Voice Speech (AVS) driver as shipped in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and 10, Red Hat In-Vehicle OS 2, and the RHEL 9 based Red Hat CoreOS used by OpenShift 4.19 and later and OpenShift 5. In avs_path_module_send_init_configs(), IDs from the ->config_ids array are used to index the separately bounded ->init_configs array without validating the index against ->num_init_configs, so a configuration ID that is too large triggers an out-of-bounds read of kernel memory. A local attacker with access to the sound subsystem who can supply crafted audio topology settings can exploit this to cause an invalid kernel memory access, resulting in a kernel panic and denial of service. Red Hat rates the impact as availability only (CVSS 3.1: 5.5, AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H): although the CVE description mentions possible exposure of sensitive kernel memory, the data involved in this out-of-bounds read is internal DSP configuration that is not returned to userspace, so no confidentiality impact is expected. RHEL 6, 7, and 8 streams, the RHEL 8 and older RHEL 9 kernel-rt streams, and OpenShift versions prior to 4.19 are not affected because the vulnerable code is not present in those kernels. Fixes for the affected streams are deferred to future planned kernel updates because exploitation requires local access with user privileges and the practical impact is denial of service; the residual risk is that a local user could crash the system.