Bug 2516396 (CVE-2026-72318)

Summary: CVE-2026-72318 kernel: cifs: validate DFS referral string offsets
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
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Priority: high    
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 CIFS component. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability by providing a specially crafted Distributed File System (DFS) referral. The system fails to properly validate string offsets within these referrals, which can lead to an out-of-bounds read. This could result in information disclosure or a denial of service.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-08-15 06:10:17 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

cifs: validate DFS referral string offsets

parse_dfs_referrals() validates that the response header and referral
array fit in the received buffer, but each referral also contains string
offsets supplied by the server.

Those offsets are used to compute the DfsPath and NetworkAddress string
pointers without checking whether they still point inside the response
buffer. A malformed referral can therefore make the computed pointer
exceed the end of the buffer. The resulting negative max_len is then
passed to cifs_strndup_from_utf16(), and the non-Unicode path forwards it
to kstrndup() as a size_t, allowing strnlen() to read out of bounds.

Validate each string offset before deriving the string pointer.