published October 9, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net/sched: reject IDR error pointers when deleting actions
tcf_action_delete() drops the reference held by its lookup before calling
tcf_idr_delete_index() with the saved action index. An unlocked
classifier can remove that action and reserve the same IDR slot with
ERR_PTR(-EBUSY) in between.
tcf_idr_delete_index() only checks the lookup result for NULL. It
therefore treats the reservation as a tc_action and dereferences
tcfa_bindcnt. A hardware execution breakpoint was used to schedule the
interleaving without changing the kernel source. KASAN reported this
decoded trace:
BUG: KASAN: null-ptr-deref in tca_action_gd+0x5b9/0x1010
Read of size 4 at addr 0000000000000010 by task poc/150
Oops: general protection fault, probably for non-canonical address 0xdffffc0000000002
RIP: tca_action_gd+0x5c0/0x1010:
arch_atomic_read at arch/x86/include/asm/atomic.h:23
raw_atomic_read at include/linux/atomic/atomic-arch-fallback.h:457
atomic_read at include/linux/atomic/atomic-instrumented.h:33
tcf_idr_delete_index at net/sched/act_api.c:766
tcf_action_delete at net/sched/act_api.c:1859
tcf_del_notify at net/sched/act_api.c:2014
tca_action_gd at net/sched/act_api.c:2064
R13: 0000000000000010 R15: fffffffffffffff0
Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception
R15 contains ERR_PTR(-EBUSY), and adding the tcfa_bindcnt offset produces
the address in R13. With the guard applied, the same reproducer returned
-ENOENT without a KASAN report or panic. Treat error pointers as absent
and return -ENOENT.