Comment by john_strinlai
16 hours ago
"Because the embargo has now been broken, no patches or CVEs exist for these vulnerabilities."
link: https://github.com/V4bel/dirtyfrag
detailed writeup: https://github.com/V4bel/dirtyfrag/blob/master/assets/write-...
importantly:
"Copy Fail was the motivation for starting this research. In particular, xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write in the Dirty Frag vulnerability chain shares the same sink as Copy Fail. However, it is triggered regardless of whether the algif_aead module is available. 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."
mitigation (i have not tested or verified!):
"Because the responsible disclosure schedule and the embargo have been broken, no patch exists for any distribution. Use the following command to remove the modules in which the vulnerabilities occur."
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"
conversation around the mitigation suggests you need a reboot or run this after the above on already-exploited machines:
sudo echo 3 > /prox/sys/vm/drop_caches
"sudo" in "sudo echo 3 > /prox/sys/vm/drop_caches" does not do anything because only runs echo, not the write.
And if a machine is already exploited, it's too late to do just that. You need to rebuild the whole disk image because anything on it could be compromised.
>And if a machine is already exploited, it's too late to do just that. You need to rebuild the whole disk image because anything on it could be compromised.
this is more targeted at the people who run the PoC to see if their machine is vulnerable.
just transcribing some relevant stuff from https://github.com/V4bel/dirtyfrag/issues/1 so that people visiting this thread dont need to poke around a bunch of different places.
Is there any additional info on where it was "published publicly by an unrelated third party"? From the timeline in the writeup:
> 2026-05-07: Submitted detailed information about the vulnerability and the exploit to the linux-distros mailing list. The embargo was set to 5 days, with an agreement that if a third party publishes the exploit on the internet during the embargo period, the Dirty Frag exploit would be published publicly.
> 2026-05-07: Detailed information and the exploit for this vulnerability were published publicly by an unrelated third party, breaking the embargo.
Edit: nevermind, details are further down in the thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055863
People are blaming the guy who wrote the exploit for breaking the embargo but it was actually broken in Linux by publishing a fix [1]:
> on 2026-05-05 Steffen Klassert pushed f4c50a4034 to netdev/net.git with Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org.
Once a fix is out it's usual for researchers to race to make the first exploit out of it.
[1] https://afflicted.sh/blog/posts/copy-fail-2.html
You can't sudo echo and redirect from the non-sudo shell like that.
or
Also fixed your typo in /proc...
Also try:
Or more simply, use
echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
thanks. copy pasting from the github via my phone, and should have taken the extra few mins
No worries, overall a very useful summary comment.
Just FYI, you can also mitigate it with `echo 1 > ...`; you don't need to drop everything, dropping `1` clears the page cache and that's enough.
Tested locally on Ubuntu 26.04:
1. Ran the exploit and got root
2. Configured the mitigations
3. Ran `su` again with no parameters and immediately got root again unprompted
4. Cleared the page cache
5. `su` asked for a password