TLDR Tech / InfoSec
AI-Assisted Bug Hunt Uncovers Linux Kernel 0-Day in net/sched
Researcher Lee Jia Jie of STAR Labs used AI to uncover and reliably trigger a use-after-free race condition in the Linux kernel's net/sched subsystem, tracked as CVE-2026-53264, where mismatched RCU locking let a shared object be freed and reused while still referenced, enabling local privilege escalation to root on systems with unprivileged user namespaces enabled. The flaw had persisted for two to three years and was independently found by an AI system named KyleBot before Jia Jie's TyphoonPwn 2026 submission, and he separately reported two exploitable perf events subsystem bugs, including CVE-2026-64300, affecting Intel bare-metal RHEL-based and Arch systems under permissive performance-monitoring settings. CVE-2026-53264 has been patched upstream by deferring object deallocation until after the RCU grace period, so administrators should pull updated kernels through their distribution's security channels and review user namespace exposure on affected desktop systems.
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