Bug 2507260 (CVE-2026-64424)

Summary: CVE-2026-64424 kernel: netpoll: fix a use-after-free on shutdown path
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
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 netpoll module. During the system shutdown process, a race condition can occur where a network transmission worker attempts to access memory that has already been deallocated. This use-after-free vulnerability can lead to system instability, causing a denial of service (DoS) by crashing the system.
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-07-25 10:13:19 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

netpoll: fix a use-after-free on shutdown path

There is a use-after-free error on netpoll, which is clearly detected by
KASAN.

      BUG: KASAN: slab-use-after-free in _raw_spin_lock_irqsave+0x3b/0x80
      Read of size 1 at addr ... by task kworker/9:1
      Workqueue: events queue_process
      Call Trace:
       skb_dequeue+0x1e/0xb0
       queue_process+0x2c/0x600
       process_scheduled_works+0x4b6/0x850
       worker_thread+0x414/0x5a0
      Allocated by task 242:
       __netpoll_setup+0x201/0x4a0
       netpoll_setup+0x249/0x550
       enabled_store+0x32f/0x380
      Freed by task 0:
       kfree+0x1b7/0x540
       rcu_core+0x3f8/0x7a0

The problem happens when there is a pending TX worker running in
parallel with the cleanup path.

This is what happens on netpoll shutdown path:

1) __netpoll_cleanup() is called
2) set dev->npinfo to NULL
3) call_rcu() with rcu_cleanup_netpoll_info()
  3.1) rcu_cleanup_netpoll_info() tries to cancel all workers with
       cancel_delayed_work(), but doesn't wait for the worker to finish
4) and kfree(npinfo);

Because 3.1) doesn't really cancel the work, as the comment says "we
can't call cancel_delayed_work_sync here, as we are in softirq", the TX
worker can run after 4).

Tl;DR: queue_process() is not an RCU reader, it reaches npinfo through
the work item via container_of().

Use disable_delayed_work_sync() to ensure the worker is completely
stopped and prevent any future re-arming attempts. Once npinfo is set
to NULL, senders will bail out and not queue new work. The disable flag
ensures any in-flight re-arming attempts also fail silently.

In the future, we can do the cleanup inline here without needing the
npinfo->rcu rcu_head, but that is net-next material.