CVE-2026-52982

About vulnerability

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

net: usb: rtl8150: fix use-after-free in rtl8150_start_xmit()

syzbot reported a KASAN slab-use-after-free read in rtl8150_start_xmit() when accessing skb->len for tx statistics after usb_submit_urb() has been called:

BUG: KASAN: slab-use-after-free in rtl8150_start_xmit+0x71f/0x760 drivers/net/usb/rtl8150.c:712 Read of size 4 at addr ffff88810eb7a930 by task kworker/0:4/5226

The URB completion handler write_bulk_callback() frees the skb via dev_kfree_skb_irq(dev->tx_skb). The URB may complete on another CPU in softirq context before usb_submit_urb() returns in the submitter, so by the time the submitter reads skb->len the skb has already been queued to the per-CPU completion_queue and freed by net_tx_action():

CPU A (xmit) CPU B (USB completion softirq)

dev->tx_skb = skb; usb_submit_urb() –+ |——-> write_bulk_callback() | dev_kfree_skb_irq(dev->tx_skb) | net_tx_action() | napi_skb_cache_put() <– free netdev->stats.tx_bytes | += skb->len; <– UAF read

Fix it by caching skb->len before submitting the URB and using the cached value when updating the tx_bytes counter.

The pre-existing tx_bytes semantics are preserved: the counter tracks the original frame length (skb->len), not the ETH_ZLEN/USB-alignment padded “count” value that is handed to the device. Changing that would be a user-visible accounting change and is out of scope for this UAF fix.

Affected product:

Ubuntu 20.04 ELS

Affected packages:

linux-meta @ 5.4.0

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.