CVE-2026-53231: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.1% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: phy: don't try to setup PHY-driven SFP cages when using genphy We don't have support for PHY-driver SFP cages with the genphy code. On top of that, it was found by sashiko that running sfp_bus_add_upstream() for genphy deadlocks, as for genphy the PHY probing runs under RTNL, which isn't the case for non-genphy drivers. This problem was reproduced, and does lead to a deadlock on RTNL. Before the blamed commit, the phy_sfp_probe() call was made by individual PHY drivers, so there was no way to get to the SFP probing path when using genphy. Let's therefore only run phy_sfp_probe when not using genphy.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 7.0, before 7.0.13 (fixed in 7.0.13); version 7.1 only

Published 2026-06-25. Last modified 2026-07-02.