CVE-2026-72247

About vulnerability

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

netfilter: nf_conncount: fix zone comparison in tuple dedup

The “already exists” dedup logic in __nf_conncount_add() decides whether a connection has already been counted and can be skipped instead of incrementing the connlimit count. It compares the conntrack zone of a list entry with the zone of the connection being added using nf_ct_zone_id() and nf_ct_zone_equal(), passing conn->zone.dir or zone->dir as the direction argument.

Those helpers take enum ip_conntrack_dir values: IP_CT_DIR_ORIGINAL is 0 and IP_CT_DIR_REPLY is 1. However, zone->dir is a u8 bitmask: NF_CT_ZONE_DIR_ORIG is 1, NF_CT_ZONE_DIR_REPL is 2 and NF_CT_DEFAULT_ZONE_DIR is 3. Passing that bitmask as the enum direction shifts the meaning of every non-zero value. An ORIG-only zone passes 1 and is tested as REPLY, while REPL-only and default zones pass 2 or 3 and test bits beyond the valid direction range. In those cases nf_ct_zone_id() can fall back to NF_CT_DEFAULT_ZONE_ID instead of using the real zone id, so different zones can be treated as equal and dedup collapses to tuple equality alone.

nf_conncount stores and compares the original-direction tuple for a connection. If an skb already has an attached conntrack entry, get_ct_or_tuple_from_skb() explicitly copies ct->tuplehash[IP_CT_DIR_ORIGINAL].tuple, regardless of the packet’s ctinfo. Therefore the zone comparison in the tuple dedup path must use IP_CT_DIR_ORIGINAL as well; the zone direction bitmask describes where a zone id applies, not which direction this conncount tuple represents.

Fix the two dedup comparisons by passing IP_CT_DIR_ORIGINAL directly. Do not special-case NF_CT_DEFAULT_ZONE_DIR and do not compare raw zone ids: using the existing helpers with IP_CT_DIR_ORIGINAL preserves the direction-aware NF_CT_DEFAULT_ZONE_ID fallback. A default bidirectional zone contains the ORIG bit, so it naturally returns the real zone id; reply-only zones continue to fall back for original-direction tuple comparisons.

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 , Debian 11 ELS , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , TuxCare 9.8 ESU , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS

Affected packages:

linux @ 4.19.0 (+10 more)

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.