Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98969
Go to dashboardThe Linux kernel's traffic-control text classifier copies a netlink algorithm name without checking for a terminating NUL byte, so an unterminated name is read past its buffer. The bytes read are passed to a usermode helper command line, which discloses kernel memory.
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.
Affects Linux systems where a user can reach net/sched traffic-control configuration, which requires CAP_NET_ADMIN in the target network namespace. Namespace-local access via unshare is enough, so multi-user hosts and container workloads with that capability are the realistic exposure. Hosts where no untrusted user holds CAP_NET_ADMIN have little exposure.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
uname -r and compare against the fixed kernel builds listed in the NVD entry (unknown in these sources).em_text module is loaded or built in with lsmod | grep em_text (unknown if the sources give a precise check).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:
net/sched: em_text: reject unterminated algo before autoload
This is a follow-up to commit 9c572a83037a ("net/sched: fix potential stack infoleak in em_text_dump()"), which zero-initialised the dump-side struct. Sashiko pointed at a pre-existing bug that exposed the change-side input-validation gap open.
em_text_change() casts the raw netlink attribute payload to struct tcf_em_text and passes conf->algo, a 16-byte array with no enforced NUL terminator, to textsearch_prepare(). On the TS_AUTOLOAD retry textsearch_prepare() calls request_module("ts_%s", algo); vsnprintf() walks %s until it finds a NUL, so an algo[] with no NUL reads past the array into the adjacent struct fields and payload and feeds those bytes to the usermode helper command line. This is an out-of-bounds read and a kernel memory disclosure.
Reject the attribute when no NUL exists within TC_EM_TEXT_ALGOSIZ bytes, matching the check xt_string has had since 3ab720881b6e.
Conditions to recreate the bug:
This page as .md · .json · in your agent: get_signal("CVE-2026-98969")
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