Bug 2554939 (CVE-2026-98532)

Summary:	CVE-2026-98532 kernel: ipv6: do not let ipv6_find_hdr() return an offset past the packet end
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	high
Version:	unspecified	CC:	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
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	---
Doc Text:	A flaw was found in the Linux kernel. A remote attacker could cause a Denial of Service (DoS) or memory corruption by sending specially crafted IPv6 network packets. The IPv6 extension header parsing mechanism fails to verify that the declared length of a header fits within the received packet data, resulting in an offset that points past the end of the buffer. Subsequent networking operations that process this invalid offset perform out-of-bounds memory reads and writes, triggering a kernel crash.	Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:		Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-10-18 15:34:02 UTC

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ipv6: do not let ipv6_find_hdr() return an offset past the packet end

ipv6_find_hdr() walks the extension header chain, skipping each header by
the length that header itself declares.  ipv6_optlen() returns up to 2048,
and the skip is never checked against skb->len, so the offset stored in
*offset can point past the end of the packet.

openvswitch installs that offset as the transport header, and
update_ipv6_checksum() then reads and writes the transport checksum field
out of bounds:

  BUG: KASAN: slab-use-after-free in inet_proto_csum_replace16+0x445/0x470
  Read of size 2 at addr ffff88810b754b06 by task ovs_ipv6_oob/629
  CPU: 4 UID: 1000 PID: 629 Comm: ovs_ipv6_oob Tainted: G N 7.3.0-rc3+ #348
  Call Trace:
   inet_proto_csum_replace16+0x445/0x470
   set_ipv6_addr+0x3dd/0x460
   do_execute_actions+0x6a3d/0x7c40
   ovs_execute_actions+0xfd/0x480
   ovs_packet_cmd_execute+0xc38/0xf20
   genl_rcv_msg+0x59e/0x870
   netlink_rcv_skb+0x18b/0x450
   genl_rcv+0x2d/0x40
   netlink_unicast+0x6bc/0xa20

  The buggy address belongs to the object at ffff88810b754980
   which belongs to the cache skbuff_small_head of size 704
  The buggy address is located 390 bytes inside of
   freed 704-byte region [ffff88810b754980, ffff88810b754c40)

Other callers use that offset too, so bound it here rather than in one
caller.

Reject a header whose declared length does not fit in the packet.
ipv6_find_hdr() already fails with -EBADMSG on a malformed chain, so this
adds no new failure mode.