CVE-2026-98318

About vulnerability

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

smb: client: validate absolute native symlink targets before NT fixups

With symlinkroot unset, an absolute target is copied without conversion to an NT drive path. Later code still assumes an NT prefix is present when modifying the target and calculating the print name length.

For “/ab”, this causes two failures: sym[5] and path[5] are written past their allocations, and plen -= 2 * poff subtracts an assumed 8-byte prefix from a 6-byte UTF-16 target, wrapping u16 plen to 65534. That underflow causes another overflow: memcpy() copies 65534 bytes into a 24-byte buffer. A user with write access to a mounted share can trigger these bugs with default settings.

Validate the NT drive prefix, including an ASCII drive letter, before accessing fixed offsets or subtracting the prefix length.

Affected product:

AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , TuxCare 9.8 ESU

Affected packages:

kernel @ 5.14.0 (+2 more)

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.