published October 18, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net/sched: fix potential stack infoleak in em_text_dump()
em_text_dump() allocates struct tcf_em_text on the stack without zeroing
it. strscpy() writes the algorithm name and a NUL terminator into
conf.algo[], leaving the remaining bytes uninitialised. nla_put_nohdr()
then copies the full struct to the netlink response.
KMSAN on Linux 7.2-rc6 reports two kernel-infoleak splats from this path,
one triggered via "tc filter show" and one via a raw RTM_GETTFILTER dump:
BUG: KMSAN: kernel-infoleak in _copy_to_iter+0x1c9/0x2620
nla_put_nohdr+0x83/0x130
em_text_dump+0x291/0x550
Local variable conf created at: em_text_dump+0x5d/0x550
Bytes 168-179 of 199 are uninitialized
I am not certain whether this constitutes a real security problem in
practice: the test was conducted in a controlled KMSAN environment and
the leaked stack bytes may or may not carry sensitive data on actual
production kernels. I am reporting it because KMSAN flagged it as a
kernel-infoleak and the fix is straightforward. I can provide a
userspace reproducer on request.
The original code used strncpy() which zero-pads to the destination size.
Commit b04202d6065c ("net/sched: replace strncpy with strscpy") replaced
it with strscpy(), which does not pad, creating this condition.
Zero-initialising the struct closes it.