CVE-2026-23206

Updated on 14 Feb 2026

Severity

5.5 Medium severity

Details

CVSS score
5.5
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Overview

About vulnerability

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

dpaa2-switch: prevent ZERO_SIZE_PTR dereference when num_ifs is zero

The driver allocates arrays for ports, FDBs, and filter blocks using kcalloc() with ethsw->sw_attr.num_ifs as the element count. When the device reports zero interfaces (either due to hardware configuration or firmware issues), kcalloc(0, …) returns ZERO_SIZE_PTR (0x10) instead of NULL.

Later in dpaa2_switch_probe(), the NAPI initialization unconditionally accesses ethsw->ports[0]->netdev, which attempts to dereference ZERO_SIZE_PTR (address 0x10), resulting in a kernel panic.

Add a check to ensure num_ifs is greater than zero after retrieving device attributes. This prevents the zero-sized allocations and subsequent invalid pointer dereference.

Details

Affected product:
AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , TuxCare 9.6 ESU
Affected packages:
kernel @ 5.14.0 (+1 more)

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

dpaa2-switch: prevent ZERO_SIZE_PTR dereference when num_ifs is zero

The driver allocates arrays for ports, FDBs, and filter blocks using kcalloc() with ethsw->sw_attr.num_ifs as the element count. When the device reports zero interfaces (either due to hardware configuration or firmware issues), kcalloc(0, …) returns ZERO_SIZE_PTR (0x10) instead of NULL.

Later in dpaa2_switch_probe(), the NAPI initialization unconditionally accesses ethsw->ports[0]->netdev, which attempts to dereference ZERO_SIZE_PTR (address 0x10), resulting in a kernel panic.

Add a check to ensure num_ifs is greater than zero after retrieving device attributes. This prevents the zero-sized allocations and subsequent invalid pointer dereference.

Fixes