CVE-2026-97989 PUBLISHED

vduse: validate virtqueue alignment

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 25.09.2026 Published: 25.09.2026 Updated: 25.09.2026

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

vduse: validate virtqueue alignment

vduse_validate_config() only checks the upper bound of vq_align. Invalid values can therefore reach vring_create_virtqueue_map(). The split-ring helpers use align - 1 as a bit mask, so the alignment must be a non-zero power of two. A zero value makes vring_size() drop the descriptor and available-ring part and vring_init() leave the used ring pointer NULL.

The VIRTIO spec requires the used ring to start at an address aligned to at least 4 bytes. Reject values below VRING_USED_ALIGN_SIZE as well as non-power-of-two values before they reach the virtio ring helpers.

Opening a virtio-net device created with vq_align=0 triggered:

BUG: KASAN: null-ptr-deref in virtqueue_kick_prepare_split+0xe3/0x100 Read of size 2 at addr 0000000000000000 by task systemd-network/1062

Call Trace (relevant frames): dump_stack_lvl print_report kasan_report __asan_load2 virtqueue_kick_prepare_split+0xe3/0x100 virtqueue_kick_prepare+0x40/0x60 try_fill_recv+0x857/0x1250 virtnet_open+0x189/0x460 __dev_open+0x225/0x390 __dev_change_flags+0x368/0x3b0 netif_change_flags+0x56/0xc0 do_setlink.isra.0+0x68c/0x1e30

Validate the value before it reaches the virtio ring helpers.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from c8a6153b6c59d95c0e091f053f6f180952ade91e to c3c3b0839a1197530cc18f535062fc84dbdfc885 (excl.)
  • affected from c8a6153b6c59d95c0e091f053f6f180952ade91e to fa2c25b4add57888acfa89e398389e267bff3dcf (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 5.15 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 5.15 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 7.2.7 to 7.2.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.3-rc3 to * (incl.)

References