What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-98255: tcp: exclude old ACKs from tcp fast path

• Severity: unknown
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-10-06 · updated 2026-10-19

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: tcp: exclude old ACKs from tcp fast path Exclude old ACKs before SND.UNA from the tcp fast path as well as ACKs after SND.NXT. Such ACKs will fall through to the slow path, where tcp_ack() performs the appropriate validation and challenge ACK handling according to RFC5961 and Commit 3d501dd326fb1c7 ("tcp: do not accept ACK of bytes we never sent"). This prevents old ACKs from being accepted or modifying connection state as part of the fast path before appropriate ACK validation is applied. In particular, this prevents payload carried by a segment with an excessively old ACK from advancing RCV.NXT before the ACK is rejected.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 4.14 — fixed in 7.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 7.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/07cacab90290f795bad2e566790f4ba8e84cdf5f
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1c8448db5cf35a13d82b0c9004ffdb49358883e7
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6eb9b697f50b73b9684e466c1e97f4ca8e947a59
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8205ac5ddb42a1843fa8d6a8c295b5c7f4f8c6ed
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8309dc2cc360056aa9cd2acfbfc25930798c3b66
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b86e1e5a4bbcbbccde8b7a3d3486604b581f6628
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f81e6c3fb06327bc49cdd6e559845293ba06a704
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ff037920c688ae6ca1153fec01e90e6782712455

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