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Fencer Intel
no cvss —

CVE-2026-98693 json

thunderbolt: Hold a router reference for each allocated HopID

published 24d ago modified 23d ago also EUVD-2026-103947

cvss
—
not scored
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 9%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

thunderbolt: Hold a router reference for each allocated HopID

tb_stop() drops the reference to all DP tunnels but does not deactivate them, thus nothing cancels a dprx_work still in flight (which holds its own tunnel reference) and the tunnel can outlive tb_switch_remove(). The HopID releases in tb_path_free() then operate on freed IDAs and trigger warnings like

ida_free called for id=8 which is not allocated.

This can be triggered by unbinding the driver while a DP tunnel is still waiting for the DPRX capabilities read to finish. On the Apple NHI unplugging the cable runs into just that reliably because the read can never finish right now and because the unplug powers down the entire USB4 complex and removes the NHI device.

Take a router reference whenever an input or output HopID is allocated and drop it again after the HopID is released. This keeps the ports and their HopID IDAs alive for as long as they are used.

The KUnit tests allocate routers without ever registering their devices so initialize the embedded struct device there as well and drop its initial reference when the test is finished.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 7.3
  • linux Debian 14 7.2.10-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-98693

  • linux Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-43.43
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1017.18
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1017.19
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1010.11
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1018.18
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1020.21
  • linux-oracle Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1016.18
  • linux-aws-7.0 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 7.0.0-1017.18~24.04.1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2026-98693

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2026-98693 updated cvss 4.1

kernel: thunderbolt: Hold a router reference for each allocated HopID

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +82 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 5 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9
    affected: no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 kernel-rt, kernel-rt-selftests-internal Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-8
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.20% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 9% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-11).

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.