CVE-2026-97598

About vulnerability

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

ipv4: fib: bound automatic table ID allocation

fib_empty_table() probes every table ID from 1 until it finds a free one. IPv4 tables are stored in a 256-bucket hash table, so a dense set of IDs makes each probe walk a growing hash chain while RTNL is held.

Automatic table assignment (“ip rule … table 0”) is an IPv4-only legacy path. Bound the automatically allocated ID to 4096 so the RTNL hold stays bounded, without changing lookups of explicitly specified table IDs.

This changes user-visible behavior. A table-0 rule previously received the lowest free ID in 1..RT_TABLE_MAX (0xFFFFFFFF). After this patch the search stops at 4096 and the rule add fails with ENOBUFS if that range is fully occupied. Explicit table IDs above 4096 remain usable.

The automatic path is unused in practice: it is IPv4-only, not documented by ip-rule, uncovered by kernel selftests, and both NetworkManager and systemd refuse table 0.

Affected product:

AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , Amazon Linux 2 ELS , CentOS 6 ELS , CentOS 7 ELS , CentOS 8.4 ELS , CentOS 8.5 ELS , CentOS Stream 8 ELS , CloudLinux 7 ELS , Debian 10 ELS , Debian 11 ELS , Oracle Linux 6 ELS , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , RHEL 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , TuxCare 9.8 ESU , Ubuntu 16.04 ELS , Ubuntu 18.04 ELS , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS

Affected packages:

linux @ 5.4.0 (+19 more)

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.