Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98693
Go to dashboardWhen the Thunderbolt driver is unbound while a DisplayPort tunnel is still waiting for its DPRX capability read, the tunnel can outlive the router, so HopID releases operate on freed IDAs and trigger kernel warnings. The sources do not describe a confirmed attacker-controlled exploit path; the bug is a use-after-teardown triggered by unplugging or unbinding hardware.
Summary written from the sources below. Check the originals before acting.
First seen by InfraStack 2026-10-23 21:57 UTC. All times on this page are UTC.
Systems running a Linux kernel with the Thunderbolt/USB4 driver, especially Apple hardware with the NHI device, where unplugging a cable during a DisplayPort tunnel setup reliably triggers the path. Systems without Thunderbolt or USB4 hardware are not in the described path. The sources do not give the affected kernel version range.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
Unknown from the sources.
Unknown from the sources.
Each row is the first time that source carried this signal. The analyst’s rows are its own findings.
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
thunderbolt: Hold a router reference for each allocated HopID
tb_stop() drops the reference to all DP tunnels but does not deactivate them, thus nothing cancels a dprx_work still in flight (which holds its own tunnel reference) and the tunnel can outlive tb_switch_remove(). The HopID releases in tb_path_free() then operate on freed IDAs and trigger warnings like
ida_free called for id=8 which is not allocated.
This can be triggered by unbinding the driver while a DP tunnel is still waiting for the DPRX capabilities read to finish. On the Apple NHI unplugging the cable runs into just that reliably because the read can never finish right now and because the unplug powers down the entire USB4 complex and removes the NHI device.
Take a router reference whenever an input or output HopID is allocated and drop it again after the HopID is released. This keeps the ports and their HopID IDAs alive for as long as they are used.
The KUnit tests allocate routers without ever registering their devices so initialize the embedded struct device there as well and drop its initial reference when the test is finished.
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