Linux Kernel Open vSwitch Meter Attach Makes the Meter Visible Before All Checks Succeed, Creating a Use-After-Free on Plain kfree Failure

Status: NEW  |  Advisory ID: CVE-2026-74465

Key Details

What to Know

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

net: openvswitch: fix potential UAF on meter attach failure

While attaching a newly created meter attach_meter() function makes

the new meter visible to other CPUs but can still fail afterwards.

On failure, it detaches the meter back and returns an error.

However, this is an unexpected behavior for the ovs_meter_cmd_set()

that uses a plain kfree(meter) on attach failure without waiting for

RCU readers to stop using it, assuming it was never visible.

This is never a problem for ovs-vswitchd as it always creates meters

before creating any flows that use them. But the UAF can be triggered

with a custom application using uAPI:

BUG: KASAN: slab-use-after-free in ovs_meter_execute (net/openvswitch/meter.c:653)

Read of size 8 at addr ffff88810d152650 by task meter/2508

Call Trace:

ovs_meter_execute (net/openvswitch/meter.c:653)

do_execute_actions (net/openvswitch/actions.c:1407)

ovs_execute_actions (net/openvswitch/actions.c:1584)

ovs_packet_cmd_execute (net/openvswitch/datapath.c:703)

...

netlink_sendmsg (af_netlink.c:1900)

Allocated by task 2519:

__kasan_kmalloc (mm/kasan/common.c:398 mm/kasan/common.c:415)

ovs_meter_cmd_set (net/openvswitch/meter.c:422)

...

netlink_sendmsg (af_netlink.c:1900)

Freed by task 2519:

kfree (mm/slub.c:2705 mm/slub.c:6405 mm/slub.c:6720)

ovs_meter_cmd_set (net/openvswitch/meter.c:479)

...

netlink_sendmsg (af_netlink.c:1900)

Fix that by making sure attach_meter() doesn't make the meter visible

until all the checks are done and the function can't fail anymore.

This also makes sure the "hash" value is calculated after the potential

re-sizing of the table.

Reported by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative as ZDI-CAN-31642. (NVD)

References