CVE-2026-52974
HighCVSS 7.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk39th percentile — higher than 39% of all known CVEs
Summary
A memory leak in the Linux kernel's TLS subsystem occurs when hardware TLS offload setup fails for an incoming connection. The cleanup path fails to free the anchor skb allocated by the strparser. This issue was introduced after a change to the strparser implementation.
Risk Assessment
The memory leak can gradually exhaust system resources, especially under frequent failed TLS offload connection attempts, potentially leading to degraded performance or system crashes.
Recommendation
Update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix for CVE-2026-52974. As a workaround, consider disabling hardware TLS offload for incoming connections if feasible.
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.