CVE-2026-23095: gue: Fix skb memleak with inner IP protocol 0.

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-02-04 · updated 2026-10-19
Weakness: CWE-401

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: gue: Fix skb memleak with inner IP protocol 0. syzbot reported skb memleak below. [0] The repro generated a GUE packet with its inner protocol 0. gue_udp_recv() returns -guehdr->proto_ctype for "resubmit" in ip_protocol_deliver_rcu(), but this only works with non-zero protocol number. Let's drop such packets. Note that 0 is a valid number (IPv6 Hop-by-Hop Option). I think it is not practical to encap HOPOPT in GUE, so once someone starts to complain, we could pass down a resubmit flag pointer to distinguish two zeros from the upper layer: * no error * resubmit HOPOPT [0] BUG: memory leak unreferenced object 0xffff888109695a00 (size 240): comm "syz.0.17", pid 6088, jiffies 4294943096 hex dump (first 32 bytes): 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ 00 40 c2 10 81 88 ff ff 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 .@.............. backtrace (crc a84b336f): kmemleak_alloc_recursive include/linux/kmemleak.h:44 [inline] slab_post_alloc_hook mm/slub.c:4958 [inline] slab_alloc_node mm/slub.c:5263 [inline] kmem_cache_alloc_noprof+0x3b4/0x590 mm/slub.c:5270 __build_skb+0x23/0x60 net/core/skbuff.c:474 build_skb+0x20/0x190 net/core/skbuff.c:490 __tun_build_skb drivers/net/tun.c:1541 [inline] tun_build_skb+0x4a1/0xa40 drivers/net/tun.c:1636 tun_get_user+0xc12/0x2030 drivers/net/tun.c:1770 tun_chr_write_iter+0x71/0x120 drivers/net/tun.c:1999 new_sync_write fs/read_write.c:593 [inline] vfs_write+0x45d/0x710 fs/read_write.c:686 ksys_write+0xa7/0x170 fs/read_write.c:738 do_syscall_x64 arch/x86/entry/syscall_64.c:63 [inline] do_syscall_64+0xa4/0xf80 arch/x86/entry/syscall_64.c:94 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x77/0x7f

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 3.18 before 5.10.249; from 5.11 before 5.15.199; from 5.16 before 6.1.162; from 6.2 before 6.6.122; from 6.7 before 6.12.68; from 6.13 before 6.18.8 — fixed in 5.10.249, 5.15.199, 6.1.162, 6.12.68, 6.18.8, 6.6.122

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.10.249, 5.15.199, 6.1.162, 6.12.68. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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