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CVE-2026-31429

net: skb: fix cross-cache free of KFENCE-allocated skb head

Published: 4/20/2026 Last updated: 5/11/2026 Reserved: 3/9/2026

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: skb: fix cross-cache free of KFENCE-allocated skb head SKB_SMALL_HEAD_CACHE_SIZE is intentionally set to a non-power-of-2 value (e.g. 704 on x86_64) to avoid collisions with generic kmalloc bucket sizes. This ensures that skb_kfree_head() can reliably use skb_end_offset to distinguish skb heads allocated from skb_small_head_cache vs. generic kmalloc caches. However, when KFENCE is enabled, kfence_ksize() returns the exact requested allocation size instead of the slab bucket size. If a caller (e.g. bpf_test_init) allocates skb head data via kzalloc() and the requested size happens to equal SKB_SMALL_HEAD_CACHE_SIZE, then slab_build_skb() -> ksize() returns that exact value. After subtracting skb_shared_info overhead, skb_end_offset ends up matching SKB_SMALL_HEAD_HEADROOM, causing skb_kfree_head() to incorrectly free the object to skb_small_head_cache instead of back to the original kmalloc cache, resulting in a slab cross-cache free: kmem_cache_free(skbuff_small_head): Wrong slab cache. Expected skbuff_small_head but got kmalloc-1k Fix this by always calling kfree(head) in skb_kfree_head(). This keeps the free path generic and avoids allocator-specific misclassification for KFENCE objects.

CNA assigner: Linux (416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67) Requested by: n/a

Opam packages affected (29)

albatross cdrom conf-bpftool conf-libbpf conf-linux-libc-dev core core_unix hvsock mirage-block-unix mm ocaml-probes ortools_solvers orun rawlink rawlink-eio rawlink-lwt restricted shell solo5 solo5-bindings-hvt solo5-bindings-spt solo5-cross-aarch64 solo5-kernel-ukvm tracy-client tuntap uring vhd-format vhd-format-lwt xapi-stdext-unix

Products affected (4)

Product Vendor Version
Linux Linux 3.16.0S
Linux Linux 3.16.1S
Linux Linux < 10.0.25398.1849
Linux Linux n/a

References (10)