High · published August 15, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
netfilter: nf_conncount: prevent connlimit drops for early confirmed ct
Commit 69894e5b4c5e ("netfilter: nft_connlimit: update the count if add
was skipped") introduced a regression where packets for valid
connections are dropped when using connlimit for soft-limiting
scenarios.
The issue occurs when a new connection reuses a socket currently in
the TIME_WAIT state. In this scenario, the connection tracking entry
is evaluated as already confirmed. Previously, __nf_conncount_add()
assumed that if a connection was confirmed and did not originate from
the loopback interface, it should skip the addition and return -EEXIST.
Skipping the addition triggers a garbage collection run that cleans up
the TIME_WAIT connection. Consequently, the active connection count
drops to 0, which xt_connlimit mishandles, leading to the false rejection
of the perfectly valid new connection.
Fix this by replacing the interface check with protocol-agnostic state
checks. We now skip the tree insertion and preserve the lockless garbage
collection optimization only if the connection is IPS_ASSURED. This
allows early-confirmed setup packets (such as reused TIME_WAIT sockets
or locally generated SYN-ACKs) to be properly evaluated and counted
without falsely dropping. The goto check_connections path is maintained
to ensure these setup packets are deduplicated correctly.
This has been tested with slowhttptest and HTTP server configured
locally to ensure we are not breaking soft-limiting scenarios for local
or external connections. In addition, it was tested with a OVS zone
limit too.