CVE-2026-31431: Copy Fail — 732 Bytes to Root on Every Major Linux Distribution
Overview Attribute Value CVE ID CVE-2026-31431 Name Copy Fail CVSS Score ~8.4 (High) Type Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) Affected All major Linux distributions since 2017 Tested Ubuntu 24.04, Amazon Linux 2023, RHEL 14.3, SUSE 16 Kernels 6.12, 6.17, 6.18 (and all back to 2017) Exploit Size 732 bytes (Python script) Dependencies Python 3.10+ (for os.splice), standard library only Race Condition None — deterministic, straight-line exploit Stealth Page cache corrupted; on-disk file and checksums unchanged What Makes Copy Fail Different Linux kernel privilege escalation bugs are not new. But Copy Fail stands apart from its predecessors in four critical ways: ...