CVE-2026-98584 PUBLISHED

net/sched: fix potential stack infoleak in em_text_dump()

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 25.09.2026 Published: 18.10.2026 Updated: 18.10.2026

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

net/sched: fix potential stack infoleak in em_text_dump()

em_text_dump() allocates struct tcf_em_text on the stack without zeroing it. strscpy() writes the algorithm name and a NUL terminator into conf.algo[], leaving the remaining bytes uninitialised. nla_put_nohdr() then copies the full struct to the netlink response.

KMSAN on Linux 7.2-rc6 reports two kernel-infoleak splats from this path, one triggered via "tc filter show" and one via a raw RTM_GETTFILTER dump:

BUG: KMSAN: kernel-infoleak in _copy_to_iter+0x1c9/0x2620 nla_put_nohdr+0x83/0x130 em_text_dump+0x291/0x550 Local variable conf created at: em_text_dump+0x5d/0x550 Bytes 168-179 of 199 are uninitialized

I am not certain whether this constitutes a real security problem in practice: the test was conducted in a controlled KMSAN environment and the leaked stack bytes may or may not carry sensitive data on actual production kernels. I am reporting it because KMSAN flagged it as a kernel-infoleak and the fix is straightforward. I can provide a userspace reproducer on request.

The original code used strncpy() which zero-pads to the destination size. Commit b04202d6065c ("net/sched: replace strncpy with strscpy") replaced it with strscpy(), which does not pad, creating this condition. Zero-initialising the struct closes it.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from b04202d6065cba5dfd51fb9866400b25573eac67 to 9923e1c537f91f3530b52d4efce85f3d9c131bf8 (excl.)
  • affected from b04202d6065cba5dfd51fb9866400b25573eac67 to 0b160417826d22f24fc31a5b9cfae3b14aa70f76 (excl.)
  • affected from b04202d6065cba5dfd51fb9866400b25573eac67 to 9c572a83037a7dcd653ba3a9cc468c16b857d0c9 (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 6.17 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 6.17 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.55 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.2.9 to 7.2.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.3-rc5 to * (incl.)

References