CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-74691

HighCVSS 8.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.26%

17th percentile - higher than 17% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the Linux kernel's Thunderbolt network driver, a vulnerability was found in the teardown sequence: DMA rings are stopped and frame buffers freed before DMA paths are deactivated. This causes in-flight data to have nowhere to drain, so the 'pending' bit never clears, leading to timeouts and link failure.

Risk Assessment

The risk is that repeated teardowns of the Thunderbolt interface can completely hang the XDomain controller, requiring a system reboot. An attacker with network access could intentionally trigger such events, causing denial of service (DoS).

Recommendation

Apply the kernel patch that reverses the teardown order (deactivate DMA paths first, then stop rings). Update the system to a kernel version that includes this fix.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: thunderbolt: Tear down DMA paths before stopping the rings tbnet_tear_down() stops both rings and frees their frame buffers before calling tb_xdomain_disable_paths(). tb_ring_stop() zeroes the ring's descriptor base and tbnet_free_buffers() unmaps and frees the pages the frames sit in, so by the time __tb_path_deactivate_hop() polls the hop's 'pending' bit, anything still in flight has nowhere to drain to. The teardown sequence has been in this order since the driver was added. The setup path has not: commit ff7cd07f3064 ("net: thunderbolt: Enable DMA paths only after rings are enabled") moved the path enable to the end of tbnet_connected_work() and documented why: /* Both logins successful so enable the rings, high-speed DMA * paths and start the network device queue. * * Note we enable the DMA paths last to make sure we have primed * the Rx ring before any incoming packets are allowed to * arrive. */ Teardown was never updated to match, so the rings and the paths now come down in the same order they go up instead of in reverse. On an ASMedia ASM4242 host router the 'pending' bit then never clears: every teardown burns the full 500 ms timeout and __tb_path_deactivate_hop() returns -ETIMEDOUT. Raising the timeout to 5 s does not help, so the hop is not slow to drain, it never drains at all. The failure is invisible above the thunderbolt core. __tb_path_deactivate_hops() is void and only calls tb_port_warn(); tb_path_deactivate(), tb_tunnel_deactivate() and __tb_disconnect_xdomain_paths() are void as well, and tb_disconnect_xdomain_paths() ends in an unconditional "return 0". So tb_xdomain_disable_paths() reports success and the netdev_warn() below it never fires. Repeated teardowns eventually take the XDomain control channel down, after which the peer node is gone and only a power cycle brings the controller back. Deactivating the paths first fixes it. Measured with kretprobes on a stock v6.17 tree with no other patches applied, on a link that was up and had just carried traffic: before: __tb_path_deactivate_hop() returns 0 for the first hop, then -ETIMEDOUT for the second 500335 us later after: 0 for both, 525 us apart Alternating the two orderings ABBA over three load levels, four teardowns per arm: every teardown failed before the change (21 of 21 that ran), none failed after (0 of 24). The before arms ran short because the link died partway through. The same split shows up when the interface is enslaved to a bond instead of just brought down, which is how I ran into this in the first place. Throughput and latency after the change are unchanged. Hosts whose routers drain the hop despite the stale descriptor base see no functional difference, since the paths end up deactivated either way.

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