CVEvulnerability

CVE-2026-31429

5.5 MEDIUM Published 2026-04-20 Modified 2026-06-17 Official page ↗
Status
Analyzed
Published
2026-04-20
Last modified
2026-06-17
Assigner
416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
5.5 MEDIUM — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: skb: fix cross-cache free of KFENCE-allocated skb head SKB_SMALL_HEAD_CACHE_SIZE is intentionally set to a non-power-of-2 value (e.g. 704 on x86_64) to avoid collisions with generic kmalloc bucket sizes. This ensures that skb_kfree_head() can reliably use skb_end_offset to distinguish skb heads allocated from skb_small_head_cache vs. generic kmalloc caches. However, when KFENCE is enabled, kfence_ksize() returns the exact requested allocation size instead of the slab bucket size. If a caller (e.g. bpf_test_init) allocates skb head data via kzalloc() and the requested size happens to equal SKB_SMALL_HEAD_CACHE_SIZE, then slab_build_skb() -> ksize() returns that exact value. After subtracting skb_shared_info overhead, skb_end_offset ends up matching SKB_SMALL_HEAD_HEADROOM, causing skb_kfree_head() to incorrectly free the object to skb_small_head_cache instead of back to the original kmalloc cache, resulting in a slab cross-cache free: kmem_cache_free(skbuff_small_head): Wrong slab cache. Expected skbuff_small_head but got kmalloc-1k Fix this by always calling kfree(head) in skb_kfree_head(). This keeps the free path generic and avoids allocator-specific misclassification for KFENCE objects.

Affected configurations

• linux linux kernel (>= 6.3 < 6.6.136) • linux linux kernel (>= 6.7 < 6.12.82) • linux linux kernel (>= 6.13 < 6.18.23) • linux linux kernel (>= 6.19 < 6.19.13) • linux linux kernel 7.0

Related

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-401 Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime weakness

References