CVE-2026-23351 PUBLISHED

netfilter: nft_set_pipapo: split gc into unlink and reclaim phase

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 13.01.2026 Published: 25.03.2026 Updated: 25.03.2026

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

netfilter: nft_set_pipapo: split gc into unlink and reclaim phase

Yiming Qian reports Use-after-free in the pipapo set type: Under a large number of expired elements, commit-time GC can run for a very long time in a non-preemptible context, triggering soft lockup warnings and RCU stall reports (local denial of service).

We must split GC in an unlink and a reclaim phase.

We cannot queue elements for freeing until pointers have been swapped. Expired elements are still exposed to both the packet path and userspace dumpers via the live copy of the data structure.

call_rcu() does not protect us: dump operations or element lookups starting after call_rcu has fired can still observe the free'd element, unless the commit phase has made enough progress to swap the clone and live pointers before any new reader has picked up the old version.

This a similar approach as done recently for the rbtree backend in commit 35f83a75529a ("netfilter: nft_set_rbtree: don't gc elements on insert").

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 3c4287f62044a90e73a561aa05fc46e62da173da to 16f3595c0441d87dfa005c47d8f95be213afaa9e (excl.)
  • affected from 3c4287f62044a90e73a561aa05fc46e62da173da to 7864c667aed01a58b87ca518a631322cd0ac34c0 (excl.)
  • affected from 3c4287f62044a90e73a561aa05fc46e62da173da to c12d570d71920903a1a0468b7d13b085203d0c93 (excl.)
  • affected from 3c4287f62044a90e73a561aa05fc46e62da173da to 500a50a301ce962b019ab95053ac70264fec2c21 (excl.)
  • affected from 3c4287f62044a90e73a561aa05fc46e62da173da to aff13667708dfa0dce136b8efd81baa9fa6ef261 (excl.)
  • affected from 3c4287f62044a90e73a561aa05fc46e62da173da to 9df95785d3d8302f7c066050117b04cd3c2048c2 (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 5.6 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 5.6 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.1.167 to 6.1.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.6.130 to 6.6.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.12.77 to 6.12.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.17 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.19.7 to 6.19.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.0-rc3 to * (incl.)

References