High · published August 22, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net: usb: ax88179_178a: fix skb leak in ax88179_tx_fixup()
When the interface has NETIF_F_SG enabled and skb_linearize() fails in
ax88179_tx_fixup(), the function returns NULL without freeing the skb.
usbnet_start_xmit() treats a NULL return from tx_fixup() as a drop
(info->flags does not set FLAG_MULTI_PACKET for this driver), jumping
to the "drop" label where it does `if (skb) dev_kfree_skb_any(skb)`.
Because tx_fixup() returned NULL, the local skb variable in
usbnet_start_xmit() is NULL, so the original skb is never freed — a
memory leak on every TX frame whose linearization fails (i.e. under
memory pressure).
Free the skb before returning, matching the error handling already used
for the pskb_expand_head() failure path in the same function.