CVE-2026-53262: high-severity vulnerability in Linux
l2tp: pppol2tp: hold reference to session in pppol2tp_ioctl()
Published · Updated
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 7.8epss 0.1%
exploitation probability
0.1%top 98% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
l2tp: pppol2tp: hold reference to session in pppol2tp_ioctl()
pppol2tp_ioctl() read sock->sk->sk_user_data directly without any
locks or reference counting. If a controllable sleep was induced during
copy_from_user() (e.g. via a userfaultfd page fault sleep), a concurrent
socket close could trigger pppol2tp_session_close() asynchronously. This
frees the l2tp_session structure via the l2tp_session_del_work workqueue.
Upon resuming, the ioctl thread dereferences the stale session pointer,
resulting in a Use-After-Free (UAF).
Fix this by securely fetching the session reference using the RCU-safe,
refcounted helper pppol2tp_sock_to_session(sk) on entry. This locks the
session's refcount across the sleep. We structured the function to exit
via standard err breaks, guaranteeing that l2tp_session_put() is cleanly
called on all return paths to drop the reference.
To preserve existing behavior we validate the session and its magic
signature only for the specific L2TP commands that require it. This
ensures that generic/unknown ioctls called on an unconnected socket
still return -ENOIOCTLCMD and correctly fall back to generic handlers
(e.g. in sock_do_ioctl()).
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Affected products
Linux · LinuxRelated CVEs — Linux
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