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CVE-2026-99079

critical

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net/mlx5e: Prevent stale XSK buffer release on refill retry When an XDP redirect to an AF…

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net/mlx5e: Prevent stale XSK buffer release on refill retry When an XDP redirect to an AF_XDP socket fails because its RX ring is full, the XSK core frees the buffer. During the subsequent batched refill of a legacy cyclic RQ, mlx5e also releases the WQE's XSK buffer before allocating a replacement. If that refill succeeds only partially, a WQE left without a replacement retains its old buffer pointer. The buffer can meanwhile be allocated to another WQE. A later refill retry can then free the live buffer through the stale pointer and publish the same UMEM frame twice. Mark the WQE as released immediately after the driver-side free. The flag is already cleared when a replacement buffer is assigned, so refill retries no longer release stale pointers. The failure is silent and produces no kernel warning or splat. A standalone legacy cyclic-RQ zero-copy libxsk reproducer, using 64-byte UDP traffic offered at 12 Mpps, detected it: stock stopped after 2,854,914 packets in 4.094 seconds, with 4,542 xdp_rx_ring_full events and 64 ownership/double-publication errors. With this change it processed 356,904,225 packets in 30 seconds despite 571,405 xdp_rx_ring_full events, with no ownership or data errors.

CVSS
9.8
9.8 (CVSS v3.1)
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Severity source: NVD CVSS v3.1 (416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67)
Timeline (UTC)
Published: 2026-10-23 13:17
Modified: 2026-10-24 14:16
NVD status: Received
Last synced 2 days ago
Verified against the source API 2026-10-27 07:06 UTC
Exploitation
Not listed in CISA KEV (as of last catalog sync)
Absence from KEV does not mean a CVE is not exploited. Exploitation status: unknown (no authoritative evidence in our sources).

Affected products

Not reported by the source (unknown — not "none").

Mitigation & advisories

No vendor advisory or patch reference tagged by NVD. Check the references below.

References

Data sources

NVD CVE API 2.0 — fetched 2026-10-27 07:06 UTC · record ↗

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