published August 15, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
Bluetooth: L2CAP: fix tx ident leak for commands without a response
Commit 6c3ea155e5ee ("Bluetooth: L2CAP: Fix not tracking outstanding
TX ident") changed ident allocation to use an IDA, releasing idents in
l2cap_put_ident() when the matching response command is received.
But identifiers allocated for commands that have no response defined
are never released. In particular L2CAP_LE_CREDITS is sent repeatedly for
the lifetime of an LE CoC channel, so a peer streaming data to the
host exhausts the 1-255 ident range after 254 credit packets. From
then on l2cap_get_ident() fails:
kernel: Bluetooth: Unable to allocate ident: -28
and every subsequent L2CAP_LE_CREDITS packet is sent with ident 0,
which is invalid (Core Spec, Vol 3, Part A, Section 4: "Signaling
identifier 0x00 is an invalid identifier and shall never be used in
any command"). Remote stacks that validate the ident drop these
commands, never receive new credits, and the channel stalls
permanently. With default socket buffers this happens after roughly 0.5 MB
of received data (the exact amount depends on the socket receive buffer):
< ACL Data TX: Handle 2048 flags 0x00 dlen 12
LE L2CAP: LE Flow Control Credit (0x16) ident 0 len 4
Source CID: 64
Credits: 1
Release the ident immediately after sending L2CAP_LE_CREDITS since no
response will ever release it. Use a local variable instead of
chan->ident so that an ident that an EXT_FLOWCTL channel may be waiting on
(e.g. a pending reconfigure) is not overwritten by a credit packet.
Also add the missing L2CAP_LE_CONN_RSP case to l2cap_put_ident() so
idents allocated for outgoing L2CAP_LE_CONN_REQ commands are released
when the response arrives.