New Linux Kernel Vulnerability Fragnesia Allows Root Privilege Escalation
Linux distributions are informing users about a new kernel vulnerability that can be exploited by a local attacker to escalate privileges to root.
Dubbed Fragnesia and officially tracked as CVE-2026-46300, the issue resides in the kernel’s XFRM ESP-in-TCP subsystem, allowing an unprivileged attacker to gain root permissions by overwriting sensitive system files.
A majority of Linux distributions are affected, and they have started releasing patches.
A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit is available, but there is no evidence that Fragnesia has been exploited in the wild.
“Similar to Dirty Frag, Fragnesia exploits a vulnerability in the XFRM ESP-in-TCP subsystem to achieve a memory write primitive in the kernel,” Microsoft’s threat intelligence team said.
“The primitive is then used to corrupt the page cache memory of the [/]usr[/]bin[/]su binary, which in turn leads to launching a shell with root privilege. Note that exploitation is not constrained to use the [/]usr[/]bin[/]su binary;...
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