Critical · published September 12, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net/smc: stop killed, freed and out_of_sync sharing a byte
The three connection state flags are single-bit bitfields, so they occupy
one byte of struct smc_connection and every store to one is a
read-modify-write of the other two:
u8 killed : 1;
u8 freed : 1;
u8 out_of_sync : 1;
They are not written under a common lock. smc_cdc_msg_validate() sets
out_of_sync from the receive tasklet, while smc_conn_kill() sets killed
from process context under lock_sock(), and the receive path does not defer
to the backlog when the socket is owned -- smc_cdc_msg_recv() takes only
bh_lock_sock().
Give each flag its own byte so a store no longer touches its neighbours.
All readers test them as booleans and are unchanged. struct smc_connection
grows by two bytes.