CVE-2025-38472 — netfilter: nf_conntrack: fix crash due to removal of uninitialised entry

Affected: Linux

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

netfilter: nf_conntrack: fix crash due to removal of uninitialised entry

A crash in conntrack was reported while trying to unlink the conntrack entry from the hash bucket list: [exception RIP: __nf_ct_delete_from_lists+172] [..] #7 [ff539b5a2b043aa0] nf_ct_delete at ffffffffc124d421 [nf_conntrack] #8 [ff539b5a2b043ad0] nf_ct_gc_expired at ffffffffc124d999 [nf_conntrack] #9 [ff539b5a2b043ae0] __nf_conntrack_find_get at ffffffffc124efbc [nf_conntrack] [..]

The nf_conn struct is marked as allocated from slab but appears to be in a partially initialised state:

ct hlist pointer is garbage; looks like the ct hash value (hence crash). ct->status is equal to IPS_CONFIRMED|IPS_DYING, which is expected ct->timeout is 30000 (=30s), which is unexpected.

Everything else looks like normal udp conntrack entry. If we ignore ct->status and pretend its 0, the entry matches those that are newly allocated but not yet inserted into the hash: - ct hlist pointers are overloaded and store/cache the raw tuple hash - ct->timeout matches the relative time expected for a new udp flow rather than the absolute 'jiffies' value.

If it were not for the presence of IPS_CONFIRMED, __nf_conntrack_find_get() would have skipped the entry.

Theory is that we did hit following race:

cpu x cpu y cpu z found entry E found entry E E is expired <preemption> nf_ct_delete() return E to rcu slab init_con…

Most recent entries from all

bdu:2025-12988

CVE-2025-38472 — netfilter: nf_conntrack: fix crash due to removal of uninitialised entry