CVE-2022-3643

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2022-12-07 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-74

Description

Guests can trigger NIC interface reset/abort/crash via netback It is possible for a guest to trigger a NIC interface reset/abort/crash in a Linux based network backend by sending certain kinds of packets. It appears to be an (unwritten?) assumption in the rest of the Linux network stack that packet protocol headers are all contained within the linear section of the SKB and some NICs behave badly if this is not the case. This has been reported to occur with Cisco (enic) and Broadcom NetXtrem II BCM5780 (bnx2x) though it may be an issue with other NICs/drivers as well. In case the frontend is sending requests with split headers, netback will forward those violating above mentioned assumption to the networking core, resulting in said misbehavior.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 10.0
Linux kernel: from 3.19 before 4.9.336; from 4.10 before 4.14.302; from 4.15 before 4.19.269; from 4.20 before 5.4.227; from 5.5 before 5.10.159; from 5.11 before 5.15.83 — fixed in 4.14.302, 4.19.269, 4.9.336, 5.10.159, 5.15.83, 5.4.227

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 4.14.302, 4.19.269, 4.9.336, 5.10.159. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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