CVE-2026-52945
HighCVSS 7.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk23th percentile - higher than 23% of all known CVEs
Summary
In the Linux kernel, a commit enabling threaded NAPI by default in the WireGuard driver was reverted because it caused complete decryption stalls for specific peers in Kubernetes environments with Cilium. The issue occurred rarely but led to permanent blocking of E/W traffic between pods and certain nodes.
Risk Assessment
The risk is a complete communication halt via WireGuard for selected peers, potentially causing application outages in Kubernetes clusters. The issue does not self-recover and requires administrative intervention.
Recommendation
Apply the patch reverting commit db9ae3b6b43c (threaded NAPI) on kernels 5.15 and 6.1. For kernels 5.10 and 6.6 the issue has not been reported, but stability should be monitored.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
See all- CVE-2026-14367Low
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In the Linux kernel's drm/panthor driver, panthor_fw_load_section_entry() skips BO creation for zero-sized firmware sections but adds them to the section list, leading to NULL pointer dereference in later paths. The fix skips adding such sections to the list.
- CVE-2026-80571Unknown
In the Linux kernel powerpc/pseries papr-phy-attest, missing validation of cmd.length could lead to buffer overflow. The fix adds length checks and fixes memory leaks on error paths.
- CVE-2026-80567Unknown
In the Linux kernel Synaptics RMI4 driver (F54), worker errors were not propagated to the V4L2 queue, causing stale or uninitialized data to be delivered to userspace. The fix adds error checking and marks buffers as error state.
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In the Linux kernel, the hynitron_cstxxx driver improperly validated touch count and finger IDs. This can lead to corrupted touch state or out-of-bounds buffer access.
- CVE-2026-80564Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the gve driver lacks an implementation of adjfine, leading to a NULL pointer dereference when triggered from userspace, e.g., via testptp.
- CVE-2026-80563Unknown
A use-after-free vulnerability was found in the Linux kernel's gpio-sloppy-logic-analyzer driver. The 'trigger' debugfs file lacked proper protection, allowing a write to freed memory during device unbind. The issue was fixed by using debugfs_create_file() instead of debugfs_create_file_unsafe().
- CVE-2026-80543Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the xcrb_msg_to_type6cprb_msgx() and xcrb_msg_to_type6_ep11cprb_msgx() functions for s390/zcrypt copy a user space message into a kernel buffer based on length, but further processing assumes 4-byte alignment. As a result, up to 3 bytes of uninitialized kernel memory are forwarded to further processing, potentially exposing kernel memory to the crypto card firmware.
- CVE-2026-80542Unknown
In the Linux kernel, the amdgpu driver for AMD Display has a NULL pointer dereference in amdgpu_dm_crtc_set_vblank() when vblank is enabled or queried before a stream is attached to acrtc_state->stream. This can lead to a system crash.
- CVE-2026-80535Unknown
In the Linux kernel XFS filesystem, during directory tree repair, a self-referential directory may be detected. In such a case, the repair code attempts to lock the same inode twice (double iolock/ilock), leading to a deadlock. The fix detects this corner case and handles it appropriately.
Original NVD description (English source)
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: Revert "wireguard: device: enable threaded NAPI" This reverts commit 933466fc50a8e4eb167acbd0d8ec96a078462e9c which is commit db9ae3b6b43c79b1ba87eea849fd65efa05b4b2e upstream. We have had three independent production user reports in combination with Cilium utilizing WireGuard as encryption underneath that k8s Pod E/W traffic to certain peer nodes fully stalled. The situation appears as follows: - Occurs very rarely but at random times under heavy networking load. - Once the issue triggers the decryption side stops working completely for that WireGuard peer, other peers keep working fine. The stall happens also for newly initiated connections towards that particular WireGuard peer. - Only the decryption side is affected, never the encryption side. - Once it triggers, it never recovers and remains in this state, the CPU/mem on that node looks normal, no leak, busy loop or crash. - bpftrace on the affected system shows that wg_prev_queue_enqueue fails, thus the MAX_QUEUED_PACKETS (1024 skbs!) for the peer's rx_queue is reached. - Also, bpftrace shows that wg_packet_rx_poll for that peer is never called again after reaching this state for that peer. For other peers wg_packet_rx_poll does get called normally. - Commit db9ae3b ("wireguard: device: enable threaded NAPI") switched WireGuard to threaded NAPI by default. The default has not been changed for triggering the issue, neither did CPU hotplugging occur (i.e. 5bd8de2 ("wireguard: queueing: always return valid online CPU in wg_cpumask_choose_online()")). - The issue has been observed with stable kernels of v5.15 as well as v6.1. It was reported to us that v5.10 stable is working fine, and no report on v6.6 stable either (somewhat related discussion in [0] though). - In the WireGuard driver the only material difference between v5.10 stable and v5.15 stable is the switch to threaded NAPI by default. [0] https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/CA+wXwBTT74RErDGAnj98PqS=wvdh8eM1pi4q6tTdExtjnokKqA@mail.gmail.com/ Breakdown of the problem: 1) skbs arriving for decryption are enqueued to the peer->rx_queue in wg_packet_consume_data via wg_queue_enqueue_per_device_and_peer. 2) The latter only moves the skb into the MPSC peer queue if it does not surpass MAX_QUEUED_PACKETS (1024) which is kept track in an atomic counter via wg_prev_queue_enqueue. 3) In case enqueueing was successful, the skb is also queued up in the device queue, round-robin picks a next online CPU, and schedules the decryption worker. 4) The wg_packet_decrypt_worker, once scheduled, picks these up from the queue, decrypts the packets and once done calls into wg_queue_enqueue_per_peer_rx. 5) The latter updates the state to PACKET_STATE_CRYPTED on success and calls napi_schedule on the per peer->napi instance. 6) NAPI then polls via wg_packet_rx_poll. wg_prev_queue_peek checks on the peer->rx_queue. It will wg_prev_queue_dequeue if the queue->peeked skb was not cached yet, or just return the latter otherwise. (wg_prev_queue_drop_peeked later clears the cache.) 7) From an ordering perspective, the peer->rx_queue has skbs in order while the device queue with the per-CPU worker threads from a global ordering PoV can finish the decryption and signal the skb PACKET_STATE_CRYPTED out of order. 8) A situation can be observed that the first packet coming in will be stuck waiting for the decryption worker to be scheduled for a longer time when the system is under pressure. 9) While this is the case, the other CPUs in the meantime finish decryption and call into napi_schedule. 10) Now in wg_packet_rx_poll it picks up the first in-order skb from the peer->rx_queue and sees that its state is still PACKET_STATE_UNCRYPTED. The NAPI poll routine then exits e ---truncated---

