CVE-2026-23436: net: shaper: protect from late creation of hierarchy

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-04-03 · updated 2026-07-24

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: shaper: protect from late creation of hierarchy We look up a netdev during prep of Netlink ops (pre- callbacks) and take a ref to it. Then later in the body of the callback we take its lock or RCU which are the actual protections. The netdev may get unregistered in between the time we take the ref and the time we lock it. We may allocate the hierarchy after flush has already run, which would lead to a leak. Take the instance lock in pre- already, this saves us from the race and removes the need for dedicated lock/unlock callbacks completely. After all, if there's any chance of write happening concurrently with the flush - we're back to leaking the hierarchy. We may take the lock for devices which don't support shapers but we're only dealing with SET operations here, not taking the lock would be optimizing for an error case.

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 6.13.1 before 6.18.20; from 6.19 before 6.19.10; 6.13, 7.0-rc1, 7.0-rc2, 7.0-rc3, 7.0-rc4, 7.0-rc5 (+2) — fixed in 6.18.20, 6.19.10

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.18.20, 6.19.10. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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