On April 29th, 2026, a local privilege escalation vulnerability affecting the Linux kernel was publicly disclosed as CVE-2026-31431 and referred to as “Copy Fail.” The vulnerability affects the algif_aead kernel module, which provides hardware-accelerated cryptographic functions.
Who is affected? This vulnerability primarily affects multi-tenant Linux hosts, container clusters, and standard Linux servers. If you are the only user on your system, you are mostly safe because the vulnerability doesn’t grant remote attackers access by itself, but it can be exploited via local code execution.