Critical · published August 15, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
ksmbd: fix use-after-free of conn->preauth_info in concurrent SMB2 NEGOTIATE
conn->preauth_info is shared connection state (struct
preauth_integrity_info, kmalloc-96) that is allocated and freed by the
SMB2 NEGOTIATE handler and read by the response send path.
smb2_handle_negotiate() allocates conn->preauth_info, and on a
deassemble_neg_contexts() failure kfrees it and sets it to NULL. Both the
allocation and the free/NULL happen under ksmbd_conn_lock(conn) (the
connection srv_mutex), which is held across the whole handler body.
The response send path smb3_preauth_hash_rsp(), called from the send:
block of __handle_ksmbd_work(), reads conn->preauth_info and dereferences
conn->preauth_info->Preauth_HashValue (via
ksmbd_gen_preauth_integrity_hash()) without taking conn_lock. When a
client drives two SMB2 NEGOTIATE requests on the same connection, one
worker can free conn->preauth_info on the failing-negotiate path while a
concurrent send-path worker is reading it, producing a slab
use-after-free read (KASAN-confirmed).
The send-path read tested conn->preauth_info for NULL but raced with the
free that occurs between the NULL check and the dereference, so the NULL
guard alone does not close the window.
Serialize the NEGOTIATE-branch read in smb3_preauth_hash_rsp() under
ksmbd_conn_lock(conn) and re-check conn->preauth_info inside the lock.
Because the negotiate handler holds conn_lock across its kfree + NULL
assignment, a reader that also takes conn_lock either runs fully before
the allocation or fully after the NULL store, and can never observe the
freed-but-not-yet-NULLed pointer. ksmbd_gen_preauth_integrity_hash()
takes no locks itself (it only computes a SHA-512 over the buffer), so
no lock-ordering inversion is introduced, and conn_lock is a sleepable
mutex which is safe on this send path (it already performs network I/O).