CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-64525

Low risk· EPSS 11%
Published: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.21%

11th percentile - higher than 11% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the Linux kernel, a vulnerability was found in the XFRM subsystem where RCU synchronization in xfrm_policy_fini() was performed in the per-netns .exit handler, causing serial delays when removing multiple network namespaces. The fix moves the synchronization to the .pre_exit handler, reducing RCU grace periods from O(N) to O(1) per batch.

Risk Assessment

The organization may experience severe performance degradation and memory exhaustion (Percpu up to 130+ GB) under heavy network namespace creation and deletion, potentially leading to denial of service (OOM) and system disruption.

Recommendation

Immediately update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix (commit moving RCU synchronization to .pre_exit) or apply an appropriate backport for the kernel version in use.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: xfrm: move policy_bydst RCU sync from per-netns .exit to .pre_exit The struct pernet_operations docstring in include/net/net_namespace.h explicitly warns against blocking RCU primitives in .exit handlers: Exit methods using blocking RCU primitives, such as synchronize_rcu(), should be implemented via exit_batch. [...] Please, avoid synchronize_rcu() at all, where it's possible. Note that a combination of pre_exit() and exit() can be used, since a synchronize_rcu() is guaranteed between the calls. xfrm_policy_fini() violates this: it calls synchronize_rcu() before freeing the policy_bydst hash tables (so no RCU reader is mid- traversal at free time), but runs from xfrm_net_ops.exit -- once per namespace -- so a cleanup_net() of N namespaces pays N full RCU grace periods serially. Use the documented pre_exit/exit split. Move the policy flush (and the workqueue drains it depends on) into a new .pre_exit handler; xfrm_policy_fini() then runs in .exit and frees the hash tables after the synchronize_rcu_expedited() that cleanup_net() guarantees between the two phases. Providing O(1) RCU grace periods per batch instead of O(N). Observed on Linux 6.18 with a workload doing unshare(CLONE_NEWNET) at ~13/sec sustained: cleanup_net() and the netns_wq rescuer kthread both stuck in xfrm_policy_fini()'s synchronize_rcu(), >300k struct net accumulated in the cleanup queue, Percpu in /proc/meminfo climbed to 130+ GB on 256-CPU hosts, and memcg OOMs followed. setup_net and __put_net counts were balanced, ruling out a refcount leak.

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