CVE-2026-74631

About vulnerability

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

net: smc: fix splice entry lifetime imbalance in smc_rx_splice

smc_rx_splice() passes pages to splice_to_pipe() before taking the references that cover the lifetime of each splice entry. In the VM-backed RMB path, splice_to_pipe() may drop unqueued entries through smc_rx_spd_release(), while queued entries are released later via the pipe buffer callback.

The old post-splice accounting also derives the number of queued VM pages from an offset mutated while building the descriptor, and a multi-page splice pairs one sock_hold() with multiple sock_put() calls.

Take the page and socket references for every candidate entry before splice_to_pipe(), and drop the matching private state, page reference, and socket reference from smc_rx_spd_release() for entries that never get queued. This fixes a refcount imbalance that can underflow page refcounts and trigger a use-after-free.

Affected product:

AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , CentOS 8.4 ELS , CentOS 8.5 ELS , CentOS Stream 8 ELS , Debian 10 ELS , Debian 11 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS

Affected packages:

kernel @ 5.14.0 (+7 more)

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.