Bug 2541184 (CVE-2026-97981)

Summary: CVE-2026-97981 kernel: net: ethernet: cortina: Count dropped frames as NAPI work
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: akhatavk, aos-team-art-private, asdas, dpaolell, jdelft, jupierce, lgarciaa, mbiarnes, ppalepu, ppostler, prdhamdh, rhel-process-autobot, sghai, sidsharm, suppawar, vlaad, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Doc Text:
A flaw was found in the Cortina Gemini Ethernet driver within the Linux kernel. The network packet receive handler fails to count dropped or malformed packets against its processing budget. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a stream of invalid network frames, causing the system to consume excessive processor resources and leading to a Denial of Service (DoS).
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-09-25 10:55:51 UTC 
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

net: ethernet: cortina: Count dropped frames as NAPI work

The RX loop only consumes budget when it successfully delivers a frame.
Error paths keep consuming descriptors without reducing the budget, so a
stream of bad frames can process the entire receive ring in one poll.

Move the budget accounting to a common end-of-frame path. This counts
each completed frame as NAPI work whether it was delivered or dropped,
matching the behavior of the vendor driver.
Comment 1 gkamathe 2026-09-30 06:47:20 UTC 
Upstream advisory:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/security/vulns.git/plain/cve/published/2026/CVE-2026-97981.mbox