CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-52974

HighCVSS 7.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.51%

40th percentile - higher than 40% of all known CVEs

Summary

A memory leak was discovered in the Linux kernel's TLS subsystem. During a failed attempt to switch TLS RX to hardware offload, the cleanup function did not free the anchor skb allocated by strparser. The issue was introduced after a change to the strparser implementation.

Risk Assessment

The memory leak can gradually exhaust system resources, especially in environments heavily using TLS (e.g., proxy servers, load balancers), potentially leading to denial of service (DoS) in extreme cases.

Recommendation

Immediately update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix (commit addressing the leak in tls_sw_free_resources_rx()). For production systems, apply the security patch from your distributor.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: tls: fix strparser anchor skb leak on offload RX setup failure When tls_set_device_offload_rx() fails at tls_dev_add(), the error path calls tls_sw_free_resources_rx() to clean up the SW context that was initialized by tls_set_sw_offload(). This function calls tls_sw_release_resources_rx() (which stops the strparser via tls_strp_stop()) and tls_sw_free_ctx_rx() (which kfrees the context), but never frees the anchor skb that was allocated by alloc_skb(0) in tls_strp_init(). Note that tls_sw_free_resources_rx() is exclusively used for this "failed to start offload" code path, there's no other caller. The leak did not exist before commit 84c61fe1a75b ("tls: rx: do not use the standard strparser"), because the standard strparser doesn't try to pre-allocate an skb. The normal close path in tls_sk_proto_close() handles cleanup by calling tls_sw_strparser_done() (which calls tls_strp_done()) after dropping the socket lock, because tls_strp_done() does cancel_work_sync() and the strparser work handler takes the socket lock.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS