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critical 9.8

CVE-2026-99078 in the critical feed json

net/mlx5e: Prevent stale XSK buffer release on MPWQE refill retry

published 19d ago modified 18d ago also EUVD-2026-108744

cvss
9.8
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.5%
EPSS 0.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 39%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

net/mlx5e: Prevent stale XSK buffer release on MPWQE refill retry

With AF_XDP on a striding RQ, mlx5e defers releasing XSK buffers until an MPWQE is refilled. If XSK allocation then returns -ENOMEM, actual_wq_head is not advanced and a later NAPI poll retries the same WQE.

mlx5e_free_rx_mpwqe() leaves each released slot marked as releasable. On retry it can therefore call xsk_buff_free() again through stale pointers after the frames have returned to the XSK pool and been reallocated.

Set all skip_release_bitmap bits in the common error path of mlx5e_xsk_alloc_rx_mpwqe(). This matches mlx5e_alloc_rx_mpwqe(). A successful allocation already clears the bitmap after replacing every buffer, so retries become idempotent without changing the success path.

Fault injection forced three consecutive failures for one selected MPWQE. Both an early allocation failure and a partial 8-of-16-buffer unwind released the original 16 XSK buffers only once. Each error left a full bitmap, the following NAPI retry skipped the release, and a later successful allocation cleared it. A 20-second AF_XDP zero-copy pressure run exercised 1,575,262 buffer allocation failures without invalid descriptors, WQE errors, or kernel warnings.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 7.3
  • linux Debian 13 6.12.113-1
  • linux Debian 14 7.2.11-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-99078

  • linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-149.149
  • linux Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-43.43
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1069.74
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1017.18
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1073.81
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1017.19
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1068.77
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1010.11

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2026-99078

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

  • kernel Azure Linux 3.0 6.6.161.1-1

azure linux advisories AZL-110975

Azure Linux vulnerability data, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, from https://github.com/microsoft/AzureLinuxVulnerabilityData via OSV, under the MIT licence; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. MIT

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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-2026-99078 updated cvss 5.9

kernel: kernel: Denial of service via stale buffer release in mlx5e driver

  • 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, openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-10
    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

0.46% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 39% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-11).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

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