CVE-2026-31669: Linux Kernel

Critical severity, CVSS 9.8. EPSS: 0.8% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mptcp: fix slab-use-after-free in __inet_lookup_established The ehash table lookups are lockless and rely on SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU to guarantee socket memory stability during RCU read-side critical sections. Both tcp_prot and tcpv6_prot have their slab caches created with this flag via proto_register(). However, MPTCP's mptcp_subflow_init() copies tcpv6_prot into tcpv6_prot_override during inet_init() (fs_initcall, level 5), before inet6_init() (module_init/device_initcall, level 6) has called proto_register(&tcpv6_prot). At that point, tcpv6_prot.slab is still NULL, so tcpv6_prot_override.slab remains NULL permanently. This causes MPTCP v6 subflow child sockets to be allocated via kmalloc (falling into kmalloc-4k) instead of the TCPv6 slab cache. The kmalloc-4k cache lacks SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU, so when these sockets are freed without SOCK_RCU_FREE (which is cleared for child sockets by design), the memory can be immediately reused. Concurrent ehash lookups under rcu_read_lock can then access freed memory, triggering a slab-use-after-free in __inet_lookup_established. Fix this by splitting the IPv6-specific initialization out of mptcp_subflow_init() into a new mptcp_subflow_v6_init(), called from mptcp_proto_v6_init() before protocol registration. This ensures tcpv6_prot_override.slab correctly inherits the SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU slab cache.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 5.12.1, before 5.15.203 (fixed in 5.15.203); from 5.16, before 6.1.169 (fixed in 6.1.169); from 6.2, before 6.6.135 (fixed in 6.6.135); from 6.7, before 6.12.82 (fixed in 6.12.82); from 6.13, before 6.18.23 (fixed in 6.18.23); from 6.19, before 6.19.13 (fixed in 6.19.13); …

Published 2026-04-24. Last modified 2026-07-14.