Bug 2571048 (CVE-2026-99285)

Summary: CVE-2026-99285 kernel: kernel: Memory corruption via multi-register byteorder conversion in netfilter
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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A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's Netfilter network packet filtering framework. When handling 64-bit byte-order conversions across multiple data registers, an offset calculation error causes the kernel to advance through source registers incorrectly. A local attacker with network administration privileges can exploit this flaw by loading specially crafted firewall rules, potentially leading to memory corruption or 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 2026-11-10 20:38:10 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

netfilter: nft_byteorder: remove multi-register support

64bit byteorder conversion is broken when several registers need to be
converted because the source register array advances in steps for 4 bytes
instead of 8:

  for (i = ...
      src64 = nft_reg_load64(&src[i]);
                             ~~~~~ u32 *src
      nft_reg_store64(&dst64[i],

Remove the multi-register support, it has other issues as well:

Pablo points out that commit
caf3ef7468f7 ("netfilter: nf_tables: prevent OOB access in nft_byteorder_eval")
alters semantics: before the loop operated on registers, i.e.
 for ( ... )
   dst32[i] = htons((u16)src32[i])

 .. but after the patch it will operate on bytes, which makes this
 useless to convert e.g. concatenations, which store each compound
 in its own register.

Multi-convert of u32 has one theoretical application:

ct mark . meta mark . tcp dport @intervalset

Because ct mark and meta mark are host byte order, use with
intervals has to convert the byteorder for ct/meta mark value
to network byte order (bigendian).

nftables emits this:
 [ meta load mark => reg 1 ]
 [ byteorder reg 1 = hton(reg 1, 4, 4) ]
 [ ct load mark => reg 9 ]
 [ byteorder reg 9 = hton(reg 9, 4, 4) ]
 ...

I.e. two separate calls.  Theoretically it could be changed to do:
 [ meta load mark => reg 1 ]
 [ ct load mark => reg 9 ]
 [ byteorder reg 1 = htonl(reg 1, 4, 8) ]
 ...

But then all it would take to change the set to
meta mark . tcp dport . ct mark

... and we'd be back to two "byteorder" calls. IOW, support to
convert a range of registers is both dysfunctional and dubious.

Simplify this: remove the feature.

Pablo Neira Ayuso points out that nftables before 1.1.0 can generate
incorrect byteorder conversions, see 9fe58952c45a,
"evaluate: skip byteorder conversion for selector smaller than 2 bytes"
in nftables.git).  Affected rulesets fail to load with this change and
old userspace due to 'len != size' check.