Bug 2516243 (CVE-2026-72296)

Summary: CVE-2026-72296 kernel: net: ife: require ETH_HLEN to be pullable in ife_decode()
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 In-band Flow Engine (IFE) component. A remote attacker could send a specially crafted IFE frame with a malformed inner Ethernet header. This improper handling of the packet structure could lead to a system crash, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS).
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-08-15 06:02:18 UTC 
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

net: ife: require ETH_HLEN to be pullable in ife_decode()

ife decode may return after making only the outer IFE header and
metadata pullable. The caller then passes the decapsulated packet to
eth_type_trans(), which expects the inner Ethernet header to be
accessible from the linear data area.

With a malformed IFE frame, the inner Ethernet header may still be
shorter than ETH_HLEN in the linear area, which can lead to a crash in
the original code.

Fix this by extending the pull check in ife_decode() so that the inner
Ethernet header is also guaranteed to be pullable before returning.
Comment 1 gkamathe 2026-08-17 11:45:19 UTC 
Upstream advisory:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2026081501-CVE-2026-72296-be28@gregkh/T