CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-53300

HighCVSS 7.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.12%

2th percentile — higher than 2% of all known CVEs

Summary

A DMA use-after-free vulnerability was found in the Linux kernel's enetc network driver, related to NTMP buffer handling. The flaw can cause silent memory corruption when a failed NTMP command is not aborted and the DMA buffer is freed while hardware may still write to it.

Risk Assessment

The organization risks data corruption or unpredictable system behavior, potentially leading to network service outages or data integrity breaches.

Recommendation

Immediately update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix (commit addressing the issue). Monitor for the patch availability in your distribution and apply it as a priority.

Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: enetc: fix NTMP DMA use-after-free issue The AI-generated review reported a potential DMA use-after-free issue [1]. If netc_xmit_ntmp_cmd() times out and returns an error, the pending command is not explicitly aborted, while ntmp_free_data_mem() unconditionally frees the DMA buffer. If the buffer has already been reallocated elsewhere, this may lead to silent memory corruption. Because the hardware eventually processes the pending command and perform a DMA write of the response to the physical address of the freed buffer. To resolve this issue, this patch does the following modifications: 1. Convert cbdr->ring_lock from a spinlock to a mutex The lock was originally a spinlock in case NTMP operations might be invoked from atomic context. After downstream support for all NTMP tables, no such usage has materialized. A mutex lock is now required because the driver now needs to reclaim used BDs and release associated DMA memory within the lock's context, while dma_free_coherent() might sleep. 2. Introduce software command BD (struct netc_swcbd) The hardware write-back overwrites the addr and len fields of the BD, so the driver cannot rely on the hardware BD to free the associated DMA memory. The driver now maintains a software shadow BD storing the DMA buffer pointer, DMA address, and size. And netc_xmit_ntmp_cmd() only reclaims older BDs when the number of used BDs reaches NETC_CBDR_CLEAN_WORK (16). The software BD enables correct DMA memory release. With this, struct ntmp_dma_buf and ntmp_free_data_mem() are no longer needed and are removed. 3. Require callers to hold ring_lock across netc_xmit_ntmp_cmd() netc_xmit_ntmp_cmd() releases the ring_lock before the caller finishes consuming the response. At this point, if a concurrent thread submits a new command, it may trigger ntmp_clean_cbdr() and free the DMA buffer while it is still in use. Move ring_lock ownership to the caller to ensure the response buffer cannot be reclaimed prematurely. So the helpers ntmp_select_and_lock_cbdr() and ntmp_unlock_cbdr() are added. These changes eliminate the DMA use-after-free condition and ensure safe and consistent BD reclamation and DMA buffer lifecycle management.

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