CVE-2026-98318 PUBLISHED

smb: client: validate absolute native symlink targets before NT fixups

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 25.09.2026 Published: 06.10.2026 Updated: 06.10.2026

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

smb: client: validate absolute native symlink targets before NT fixups

With symlinkroot unset, an absolute target is copied without conversion to an NT drive path. Later code still assumes an NT prefix is present when modifying the target and calculating the print name length.

For "/ab", this causes two failures: sym[5] and path[5] are written past their allocations, and plen -= 2 * poff subtracts an assumed 8-byte prefix from a 6-byte UTF-16 target, wrapping u16 plen to 65534. That underflow causes another overflow: memcpy() copies 65534 bytes into a 24-byte buffer. A user with write access to a mounted share can trigger these bugs with default settings.

Validate the NT drive prefix, including an ASCII drive letter, before accessing fixed offsets or subtracting the prefix length.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 3363da82e02f1bddc54faa92ea430c6532e2cd2e to 6913ff607c2bc8694193e1fcc40bf16d75f35f16 (excl.)
  • affected from 3363da82e02f1bddc54faa92ea430c6532e2cd2e to 23c240d9509e15f72e4112fc95f0160ab32ec430 (excl.)
  • Version b6ea7b6c6be65149ab6b8e37a9dd1671f76add1b is affected
  • affected from 6.15.6 to 6.16 (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 6.16 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 6.16 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 7.2.8 to 7.2.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.3-rc4 to * (incl.)

References