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CVE-2026-31429 Detail

Description

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.


Metrics

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CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
N/A
NVD assessment not yet provided.

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URL Source(s) Tag(s)
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0f42e3f4fe2a58394e37241d02d9ca6ab7b7d516 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2d64618ea846d8d033477311f805ca487d6a6696 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/474e00b935db250cac320d10c1d3cf4e44b46721 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/60313768a8edc7094435975587c00c2d7b834083 kernel.org

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source

Change History

1 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2026-31429
NVD Published Date:
04/20/2026
NVD Last Modified:
04/20/2026
Source:
kernel.org