Bug 2464356 (CVE-2026-31778)

Summary: CVE-2026-31778 kernel: ALSA: caiaq: fix stack out-of-bounds read in init_card
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security <prodsec-ir-bot>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: rhel-process-autobot, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's ALSA caiaq driver. A local user with a specially crafted USB device, containing a product name with many non-ASCII or non-space characters, can trigger a stack out-of-bounds read. This vulnerability allows the system to read past the end of a stack buffer, potentially leading to information disclosure from the kernel stack.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-05-01 15:02:01 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ALSA: caiaq: fix stack out-of-bounds read in init_card

The loop creates a whitespace-stripped copy of the card shortname
where `len < sizeof(card->id)` is used for the bounds check. Since
sizeof(card->id) is 16 and the local id buffer is also 16 bytes,
writing 16 non-space characters fills the entire buffer,
overwriting the terminating nullbyte.

When this non-null-terminated string is later passed to
snd_card_set_id() -> copy_valid_id_string(), the function scans
forward with `while (*nid && ...)` and reads past the end of the
stack buffer, reading the contents of the stack.

A USB device with a product name containing many non-ASCII, non-space
characters (e.g. multibyte UTF-8) will reliably trigger this as follows:

  BUG: KASAN: stack-out-of-bounds in copy_valid_id_string
       sound/core/init.c:696 [inline]
  BUG: KASAN: stack-out-of-bounds in snd_card_set_id_no_lock+0x698/0x74c
       sound/core/init.c:718

The off-by-one has been present since commit bafeee5b1f8d ("ALSA:
snd_usb_caiaq: give better shortname") from June 2009 (v2.6.31-rc1),
which first introduced this whitespace-stripping loop. The original
code never accounted for the null terminator when bounding the copy.

Fix this by changing the loop bound to `sizeof(card->id) - 1`,
ensuring at least one byte remains as the null terminator.