CVE-2026-98584: net/sched: fix potential stack infoleak in em_text_dump()

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: 2026-10-18 · updated 2026-10-19

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net/sched: fix potential stack infoleak in em_text_dump() em_text_dump() allocates struct tcf_em_text on the stack without zeroing it. strscpy() writes the algorithm name and a NUL terminator into conf.algo[], leaving the remaining bytes uninitialised. nla_put_nohdr() then copies the full struct to the netlink response. KMSAN on Linux 7.2-rc6 reports two kernel-infoleak splats from this path, one triggered via "tc filter show" and one via a raw RTM_GETTFILTER dump: BUG: KMSAN: kernel-infoleak in _copy_to_iter+0x1c9/0x2620 nla_put_nohdr+0x83/0x130 em_text_dump+0x291/0x550 Local variable conf created at: em_text_dump+0x5d/0x550 Bytes 168-179 of 199 are uninitialized I am not certain whether this constitutes a real security problem in practice: the test was conducted in a controlled KMSAN environment and the leaked stack bytes may or may not carry sensitive data on actual production kernels. I am reporting it because KMSAN flagged it as a kernel-infoleak and the fix is straightforward. I can provide a userspace reproducer on request. The original code used strncpy() which zero-pads to the destination size. Commit b04202d6065c ("net/sched: replace strncpy with strscpy") replaced it with strscpy(), which does not pad, creating this condition. Zero-initialising the struct closes it.

Affected products

Linux kernel: 6.17 — fixed in 7.3

How to fix

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

References

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