Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-99166
Go to dashboardThe Linux kernel RDS (Reliable Datagram Sockets) RDMA connection manager read an uninitialized transport pointer when the RDMA device was not InfiniBand, such as an iWARP RNIC like siw. A connect request arriving on such a device causes a kernel NULL dereference and crash.
Summary written from the sources below. Check the originals before acting.
First seen by InfraStack 2026-10-28 11:32 UTC. All times on this page are UTC.
Systems that load the RDS module and run an RDS listener or RDS connections over RDMA devices, especially iWARP NICs such as siw or Clang-built kernels. Hosts without RDS in use, or running only InfiniBand, are less exposed; the sources do not say which kernel versions are affected.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
uname -r and compare against the kernel release that carries the fix in the NVD entrylsmod | grep rdsrdma link show or ibv_devicesmodprobe -r rds_rdma rds if RDS is not neededEach 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: rds: fix uninitialized trans dereference in CM event handler
rds_rdma_cm_event_handler_cmn() assigns trans only when the RDMA device is an InfiniBand CA (RDMA_NODE_IB_CA). On any other device type, e.g. an iWARP RNIC such as siw, trans stays uninitialized, but the event switch dereferences it: unconditionally in the RDMA_CM_EVENT_CONNECT_REQUEST case via trans->cm_handle_connect(), and (with a connection context) in the ROUTE_RESOLVED and ESTABLISHED cases.
An RDS listener on an iWARP device therefore crashes the kernel as soon as a connect request arrives: with CONFIG_INIT_STACK_ALL_ZERO the wild load becomes a NULL dereference at offset 0xa0 (&trans->cm_handle_connect) in the iw_cm_wq workqueue.
GCC masks the bug in default builds by folding the uninitialized load into &rds_ib_transport; Clang-built kernels take the real uninitialized path and oops.
The active side can land on a non-IB device too: the id that rds_ib_conn_path_connect() creates is not restricted to a node type, so rdma_resolve_addr() binds it to whichever device serves the local address, and an iWARP RNIC on the same netdev qualifies. The crash there is different: resolving a route on an iWARP id never fills in cm_id->route.path_rec, and the ROUTE_RESOLVED case writes path_rec[0].sl before it calls into the transport.
The iWARP transport was dropped long ago and IB is the only transport left, so make that explicit: initialize trans to &rds_ib_transport at declaration, drop the conditional assignment, reject a connect request that arrives on a non-IB device, and drop a connection whose address resolved to one instead of resolving a route on it. The rejection is limited to RDMA_CM_EVENT_CONNECT_REQUEST on purpose: a non-zero return from the handler makes rdma_cm destroy the id the event was delivered on, which is right for the request's freshly created id but would free a connection id that RDS still owns for any other event. On the active side the id stays ic->i_cm_id and the connection's shutdown destroys it, so that case returns 0.
[achender: reject only on RDMA_CM_EVENT_CONNECT_REQUEST instead of bailing out for every event on a non-IB device, so that rdma_cm does not destroy connection ids RDS still tracks; drop a connection whose address resolved to a non-IB device before a route is resolved on it; changelog adjusted]
This page as .md · .json · in your agent: get_signal("CVE-2026-99166")
NVD data is provided by NIST and is public domain. Posts quoted belong to their authors.