Bug 2436814 (CVE-2026-23072)

Summary: CVE-2026-23072 kernel: l2tp: Fix memleak in l2tp_udp_encap_recv()
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
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Version: unspecifiedKeywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A memory leak vulnerability was found in the Linux kernel's L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol) implementation. After a code refactoring that moved protocol version validation in l2tp_udp_encap_recv(), the error handling path fails to call l2tp_session_put() to release the session reference. This causes l2tp_session, l2tp_tunnel, and associated socket structures to leak on each failed validation.
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-02-04 17:04:41 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

l2tp: Fix memleak in l2tp_udp_encap_recv().

syzbot reported memleak of struct l2tp_session, l2tp_tunnel,
sock, etc. [0]

The cited commit moved down the validation of the protocol
version in l2tp_udp_encap_recv().

The new place requires an extra error handling to avoid the
memleak.

Let's call l2tp_session_put() there.

[0]:
BUG: memory leak
unreferenced object 0xffff88810a290200 (size 512):
  comm "syz.0.17", pid 6086, jiffies 4294944299
  hex dump (first 32 bytes):
    7d eb 04 0c 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  }...............
    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
  backtrace (crc babb6a4f):
    kmemleak_alloc_recursive include/linux/kmemleak.h:44 [inline]
    slab_post_alloc_hook mm/slub.c:4958 [inline]
    slab_alloc_node mm/slub.c:5263 [inline]
    __do_kmalloc_node mm/slub.c:5656 [inline]
    __kmalloc_noprof+0x3e0/0x660 mm/slub.c:5669
    kmalloc_noprof include/linux/slab.h:961 [inline]
    kzalloc_noprof include/linux/slab.h:1094 [inline]
    l2tp_session_create+0x3a/0x3b0 net/l2tp/l2tp_core.c:1778
    pppol2tp_connect+0x48b/0x920 net/l2tp/l2tp_ppp.c:755
    __sys_connect_file+0x7a/0xb0 net/socket.c:2089
    __sys_connect+0xde/0x110 net/socket.c:2108
    __do_sys_connect net/socket.c:2114 [inline]
    __se_sys_connect net/socket.c:2111 [inline]
    __x64_sys_connect+0x1c/0x30 net/socket.c:2111
    do_syscall_x64 arch/x86/entry/syscall_64.c:63 [inline]
    do_syscall_64+0xa4/0xf80 arch/x86/entry/syscall_64.c:94
    entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x77/0x7f