Fragnesia: third Linux root exploit in 2 weeks (CVE-2026-46300)

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]Third Linux root exploit in two weeks.

[00:00:04]This one is called Fragnesia. Disclosed yesterday by William Bowling and the V12 security team with a public proof of concept already on GitHub. An unprivileged user runs the exploit and gets root. By now, the pattern is familiar. Copy fail at the end of April, dirty frag a week ago, and now this. But Fragnesia is a different bug than dirty frag. and last week's patch does not cover it. Bowling himself describes Fragnesia as a member of the dirty frag vulnerability class, but a separate flaw in the same family of the kernel networking code. Fragnesia lives in the IPsec layer. Specifically, how the kernel handles encrypted ESP packets carried over TCP. Dirty Frag had a bug there, too, plus a second bug in the colonel's AFS networking code. last week's patch fixed those. Ragnesia is a different flaw in the same IP set code and it needs its own patch. The exploit triggers a logic error in how the kernel reuses memory while reassembling network packets, then uses that error to overwrite readonly files in the kernel's page cache. The target is SU, the program that lets you switch to root.

[00:01:23]Modify the cached copy of SU. Run it and you have root. Same reliability profile as copy fail and dirty frag.

[00:01:31]Deterministic single shot. No kernel crashes if it fails. This affects every Linux kernel released before May 13th.

[00:01:41]Patches are rolling out across iuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Susa, Amazon Linux, Alma Linux Gen 2 and Cloud Linux. If you cannot rebu reboot immediately, V12 documents a temporary workaround. You can blacklist the ESP4, ESP6, and RXRPC kernel modules. But it's worth knowing that workaround breaks anything that actually uses IPSEC or AFS. So it is only safe for hosts that do not need those features.

[00:02:11]So now we have three Linux root exploits in 14 days. All landing the same way.

[00:02:17]Write bytes into the kernel's page cache. Corrupt the in-memory copy of a privileged program. Run it. Get root.

[00:02:25]Intel copy fail. This specific pattern of attack on cached executables had not seen much published research, but now it has.