CVE-2026-74465 PUBLISHED

net: openvswitch: fix potential UAF on meter attach failure

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 15.08.2026 Published: 15.08.2026 Updated: 15.08.2026

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

net: openvswitch: fix potential UAF on meter attach failure

While attaching a newly created meter attach_meter() function makes the new meter visible to other CPUs but can still fail afterwards. On failure, it detaches the meter back and returns an error.

However, this is an unexpected behavior for the ovs_meter_cmd_set() that uses a plain kfree(meter) on attach failure without waiting for RCU readers to stop using it, assuming it was never visible.

This is never a problem for ovs-vswitchd as it always creates meters before creating any flows that use them. But the UAF can be triggered with a custom application using uAPI:

BUG: KASAN: slab-use-after-free in ovs_meter_execute (net/openvswitch/meter.c:653) Read of size 8 at addr ffff88810d152650 by task meter/2508

Call Trace: ovs_meter_execute (net/openvswitch/meter.c:653) do_execute_actions (net/openvswitch/actions.c:1407) ovs_execute_actions (net/openvswitch/actions.c:1584) ovs_packet_cmd_execute (net/openvswitch/datapath.c:703) ... netlink_sendmsg (af_netlink.c:1900)

Allocated by task 2519: __kasan_kmalloc (mm/kasan/common.c:398 mm/kasan/common.c:415) ovs_meter_cmd_set (net/openvswitch/meter.c:422) ... netlink_sendmsg (af_netlink.c:1900)

Freed by task 2519: kfree (mm/slub.c:2705 mm/slub.c:6405 mm/slub.c:6720) ovs_meter_cmd_set (net/openvswitch/meter.c:479) ... netlink_sendmsg (af_netlink.c:1900)

Fix that by making sure attach_meter() doesn't make the meter visible until all the checks are done and the function can't fail anymore.

This also makes sure the "hash" value is calculated after the potential re-sizing of the table.

Reported by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative as ZDI-CAN-31642.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from c7c4c44c9a95d87e50ced38f7480e779cb472174 to 0310d1fa7f9debd0d89629e9f14c7975a47eaa9a (excl.)
  • affected from c7c4c44c9a95d87e50ced38f7480e779cb472174 to 4d03e5fa3fbb1df15258a1eb3d6963f0d65659b3 (excl.)
  • affected from c7c4c44c9a95d87e50ced38f7480e779cb472174 to 90623c9499627803ef3f04fa25a3199402d4fb95 (excl.)
  • affected from c7c4c44c9a95d87e50ced38f7480e779cb472174 to 431a295d93f76fbdb6a7cfce92a9e3dfee1e5d61 (excl.)
  • affected from c7c4c44c9a95d87e50ced38f7480e779cb472174 to a58a2b0ce354df531ebc71fc870058c2feb59f6b (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 5.8 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 5.8 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.6.151 to 6.6.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.12.103 to 6.12.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.44 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.1.8 to 7.1.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.2-rc6 to * (incl.)

References