CVE-2026-98524

--- CME Mitigation Guidance (2026-10-20) ---
Disclaimer: The following mitigation solutions are provided as a courtesy, pending the application of an official patch. This content was generated utilizing AI tools in conjunction with data from https://cmetaxonomy.org. Customers are advised to independently evaluate and test these temporary mitigations within their own infrastructure.

The highest-value action is to disable or restrict the RDS protocol and prevent unprivileged local users from creating RDS sockets or invoking rds_setsockopt on InfiniBand-enabled Linux systems: upgrade to the fixed release, which store the scatterlist in the MR only after DMA mapping succeeds, and unmap and clear MR fields if registration fails, closing RDS setsockopt calls triggering InfiniBand memory region mapping failures. Until patched, this is only a concern on Linux systems with local unprivileged user access permitting the creation of RDS sockets and invocation of rds_setsockopt — Non-Linux operating systems are unaffected — so Blacklist the rds and rds_ib kernel modules or restrict local unprivileged user permissions to open RDS sockets and execute rds_setsockopt operations. As a compensating measure, Deploy runtime memory error detection like KASAN to detect slab use-after-free conditions when the dangling scatterlist pointer is dereferenced during memory region teardown, Enable SLAB freelist randomization and pointer integrity verification to hinder exploitation of kernel slab memory corruption, Enforce SELinux in enforcing mode to restrict socket operations and confine post-exploitation actions of compromised processes, Deploy eBPF runtime security monitoring with Falco to detect anomalous kernel-level behavior or privilege escalation attempts via RDS setsockopt calls, Enable SMEP and SMAP to prevent the kernel from executing userspace code or directly accessing userspace data during memory corruption exploitation, and Enable kernel Control Flow Integrity and shadow call stack validation on indirect call targets to prevent control-flow hijacking. These controls limit blast radius and contain exploitation, but they do not fix the underlying slab use-after-free defect — apply the upstream patch to fully remediate.

Highest-impact CME: CME-301 SELinux (Enforcing Mode) (medium)