netfilter: nf_conncount: prevent connlimit drops for early confirmed ct
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 7.5epss 0.7%
exploitation probability
0.7%top 48% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
netfilter: nf_conncount: prevent connlimit drops for early confirmed ct
Commit 69894e5b4c5e ("netfilter: nft_connlimit: update the count if add
was skipped") introduced a regression where packets for valid
connections are dropped when using connlimit for soft-limiting
scenarios.
The issue occurs when a new connection reuses a socket currently in
the TIME_WAIT state. In this scenario, the connection tracking entry
is evaluated as already confirmed. Previously, __nf_conncount_add()
assumed that if a connection was confirmed and did not originate from
the loopback interface, it should skip the addition and return -EEXIST.
Skipping the addition triggers a garbage collection run that cleans up
the TIME_WAIT connection. Consequently, the active connection count
drops to 0, which xt_connlimit mishandles, leading to the false rejection
of the perfectly valid new connection.
Fix this by replacing the interface check with protocol-agnostic state
checks. We now skip the tree insertion and preserve the lockless garbage
collection optimization only if the connection is IPS_ASSURED. This
allows early-confirmed setup packets (such as reused TIME_WAIT sockets
or locally generated SYN-ACKs) to be properly evaluated and counted
without falsely dropping. The goto check_connections path is maintained
to ensure these setup packets are deduplicated correctly.
This has been tested with slowhttptest and HTTP server configured
locally to ensure we are not breaking soft-limiting scenarios for local
or external connections. In addition, it was tested with a OVS zone
limit too.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Affected products
Linux · LinuxReferences
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/000ac6830b56499d6b65fd91486ce6689eb02be4https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/329f2626ee5cb8fafdf6b58b624311529c57cb45https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3793d24de224943e0a6016bbeffb6f5c4cea2e3dhttps://git.kernel.org/stable/c/abef7f817217fcb62c11821d6b895063eadb2828https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/be52572c6d55f677ba76869d3c63805c0d4891a3https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c8b6f36f766991e3ebebec6596daee4b04dcbc49https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/cbe2d14a7c5b1fc71821fbfee5c4963917411e92https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ebfe8249ba79e4ff0f1e3aad8787b992ef27f026