CVEvulnerability
CVE-2026-89975
- Status
- Received
- Published
- 2026-09-16
- Last modified
- 2026-10-21
- Assigner
- 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
nvme-fabrics: fix DHCHAP secret leak on parse failure
nvmf_parse_options() duplicates dhchap_secret and dhchap_ctrl_secret
with match_strdup() before validating the DHHC-1: representation.
If validation fails, the parser returns -EINVAL before the temporary
string in p is assigned to opts->dhchap_secret or
opts->dhchap_ctrl_secret. nvmf_create_ctrl() subsequently frees opts,
but nvmf_free_options() cannot release the unassigned temporary string.
Each rejected option therefore leaks one allocation.
This is easy to miss because valid secrets transfer ownership to opts
and are freed normally, while the malformed-secret path still returns
the expected -EINVAL to userspace.
With CONFIG_NVME_HOST_AUTH enabled, the leak is reachable before the
required-option checks and transport lookup. No NVMe-oF target or
working transport connection is required; for example, repeatedly
writing
dhchap_secret=BAD
or
dhchap_ctrl_secret=BAD
to /dev/nvme-fabrics deterministically takes the leaking parse path.
Free the temporary string before leaving both validation error paths.
Use kfree_sensitive() because the copied option may contain secret
material even when its representation is rejected, matching the
sensitive cleanup used for stored DHCHAP secrets.
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/15d7a35a489287109b5a7c157d53d9b8214f0318 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3ce0e9b43f355dfa0bdc0e0dd889795752285791 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/702c1ae0d31b44828ec3c87079def490c1ee1fb3 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/afdee49a1b88ed9bb44e2b30e855297c169bcc53 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d21da6cc91ba1c4f1ae5ba007f3cb89e1c0c7549 git.kernel.org