CVE-2026-46033

About vulnerability

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

crypto: authencesn - reject short ahash digests during instance creation

authencesn requires either a zero authsize or an authsize of at least 4 bytes because the ESN encrypt/decrypt paths always move 4 bytes of high-order sequence number data at the end of the authenticated data.

While crypto_authenc_esn_setauthsize() already rejects explicit non-zero authsizes in the range 1..3, crypto_authenc_esn_create() still copied auth->digestsize into inst->alg.maxauthsize without validating it. The AEAD core then initialized the tfm’s default authsize from that value.

As a result, selecting an ahash with digest size 1..3, such as cbcmac(cipher_null), exposed authencesn instances whose default authsize was invalid even though setauthsize() would have rejected the same value. AF_ALG could then trigger the ESN tail handling with a too-short tag and hit an out-of-bounds access.

Reject authencesn instances whose ahash digest size is in the invalid non-zero range 1..3 so that no tfm can inherit an unsupported default authsize.

Affected product:

AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , Amazon Linux 2 ELS , CentOS 8.4 ELS , CentOS 8.5 ELS , CentOS Stream 8 ELS , Debian 10 ELS , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , Ubuntu 16.04 ELS , Ubuntu 18.04 ELS , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS

Affected packages:

kernel-uek @ 5.4.17 (+11 more)

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.