CVE-2026-98023

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

vxlan: reject dynamic fdb entries that reference a nexthop id

The commit cited in the Fixes tag allowed VXLAN FDB entries to point to FDB nexthops so that overlay traffic could be load balanced across multiple VTEPs. Such entries can only be configured from user space, cannot be learned and cannot roam. They only make sense with a user space control plane such as E-VPN where data plane learning is disabled.

Despite that, the VXLAN driver does not currently prevent such entries from being configured with the "dynamic" flag. The per-nexthop FDB list is only protected by the per-device hash lock, which is not sufficient when two VXLAN devices point to the same FDB nexthop and therefore share the list. Aging runs in softirq context without RTNL, so an entry deleted by one device can race with an addition or deletion from the other, leading to list corruption:

list_del corruption. next->prev should be ffff8881069d9548, but was dead000000000122. (next=ffff8881069d9448) WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 90 at lib/list_debug.c:65 __list_del_entry_valid_or_report+0x1aa/0x210 … vxlan_fdb_destroy+0x5b8/0xad0 vxlan_cleanup+0x328/0x450 call_timer_fn+0x2a/0x1c0 run_timer_softirq+0x18c/0x210 BUG: KASAN: slab-use-after-free in vxlan_fdb_destroy

Fix this by rejecting the bogus configuration of dynamic FDB entries that point to FDB nexthops, both when created and when an existing entry is updated. As such, the per-nexthop FDB list is only ever mutated under the RTNL lock. Add test cases to make sure that this does not regress in the future.

Affected Software

VendorProductVersion RangeStatus
LinuxLinux1274e1cc42264d4e629841e4f182795cb0becfd2 < 28f86eec851b7406a4bc6143f82aeba2882d9842affected
LinuxLinux1274e1cc42264d4e629841e4f182795cb0becfd2 < 53359916ceb649b7e6947c8c2f669368a41c1354affected
LinuxLinux1274e1cc42264d4e629841e4f182795cb0becfd2 < 3fa64d86fc64eda104e3e97721a12a42a2fd2073affected
LinuxLinux1274e1cc42264d4e629841e4f182795cb0becfd2 < 98fc57d167446b95b4e719815fe79edef93f8e7aaffected
LinuxLinux5.8affected
LinuxLinux0 < 5.8unaffected
LinuxLinux6.12.111 <= 6.12.*unaffected
LinuxLinux6.18.53 <= 6.18.*unaffected
LinuxLinux7.2.7 <= 7.2.*unaffected
LinuxLinux7.3-rc3 <= *unaffected

Weaknesses

References