CVE-2026-98284

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

netlink: do not free nlk->groups while lockless readers can use it

netlink_realloc_groups() uses krealloc() under netlink_table_grab(). Whenever NLGRPSZ(groups) lands in a different kmalloc bucket, the old bitmap is freed immediately.

Two readers of nlk->groups / nlk->ngroups do not hold the netlink table lock:

1. sk_diag_dump_groups(). Hashed (bound) sockets are dumped from the rhashtable walk in __netlink_diag_dump(), which only holds RCU. Only the mc_list part of the dump takes nl_table_lock.

2. netlink_native_seq_show() (/proc/net/netlink), whose walk has been lockless since commit 21e4902aea80 (netlink: Lockless lookup with RCU grace period in socket release).

Both can read a freed buffer, and sk_diag_dump_groups() can also read past the end of the old (smaller) buffer if it happens to load the old @groups pointer together with the new @ngroups value, copying the result into a NETLINK_DIAG_GROUPS attribute.

This is the same class of bug that commit f773608026ee (netlink: access nlk groups safely in netlink bind and getname) fixed for bind() and getname(); these two readers were missed. Simply grabbing the table lock in sk_diag_dump_groups() is not an option, because it is also called with nl_table_lock already held from the mc_list section of the dump.

Make the lockless readers safe instead:

• Allocate a new bitmap and free the old one after an RCU grace period, instead of relying on the implicit kfree() done by krealloc().

• Publish @groups before @ngroups, both with release semantics, and have the lockless readers load @ngroups first. A reader can then never pair the new (bigger) size with the old (smaller) buffer, and a reader picking up the new pointer while still seeing the old size is guaranteed to see the initialized bitmap.

netlink_realloc_groups() is called from process context (bind() and setsockopt()), so kfree_rcu_mightsleep() can be used, once the table has been released.

Affected Software

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/22f313e211d58a66786c81487c3905fa5d4b2a8f
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ceac0de741bfb47ca255eee075257b3bb31f0651