Copyright © 2012 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved. Important 2026-04-24T00:00:00 kernel: mptcp: fix slab-use-after-free in __inet_lookup_established 7.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:L/A:H CWE-763

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mptcp: fix slab-use-after-free in __inet_lookup_established The ehash table lookups are lockless and rely on SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU to guarantee socket memory stability during RCU read-side critical sections. Both tcp_prot and tcpv6_prot have their slab caches created with this flag via proto_register(). However, MPTCP's mptcp_subflow_init() copies tcpv6_prot into tcpv6_prot_override during inet_init() (fs_initcall, level 5), before inet6_init() (module_init/device_initcall, level 6) has called proto_register(&tcpv6_prot). At that point, tcpv6_prot.slab is still NULL, so tcpv6_prot_override.slab remains NULL permanently. This causes MPTCP v6 subflow child sockets to be allocated via kmalloc (falling into kmalloc-4k) instead of the TCPv6 slab cache. The kmalloc-4k cache lacks SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU, so when these sockets are freed without SOCK_RCU_FREE (which is cleared for child sockets by design), the memory can be immediately reused. Concurrent ehash lookups under rcu_read_lock can then access freed memory, triggering a slab-use-after-free in __inet_lookup_established. Fix this by splitting the IPv6-specific initialization out of mptcp_subflow_init() into a new mptcp_subflow_v6_init(), called from mptcp_proto_v6_init() before protocol registration. This ensures tcpv6_prot_override.slab correctly inherits the SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU slab cache.

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's Multipath TCP (MPTCP) implementation. Due to incorrect memory allocation for IPv6 subflow child sockets, a use-after-free vulnerability exists. A remote attacker could exploit this by triggering concurrent lookups in the kernel's hash table, potentially leading to a denial of service or arbitrary code execution.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Affected kernel Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Not affected kernel Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Not affected kernel Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Not affected kernel-rt Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Affected kernel Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Affected kernel-rt Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Affected kernel Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Affected kernel-rt https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-31669 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-31669 https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2026042406-CVE-2026-31669-0e0d@gregkh/T