CVE-2026-80603: Linux

Critical severity, CVSS 9.1. EPSS: 0.6% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: netfilter: nf_conntrack_irc: fix parse_dcc() off-by-one OOB read parse_dcc() treats data_end as an inclusive end pointer, but its only caller passes data_limit = ib_ptr + datalen, which points one past the last valid byte. The newline search loop iterates while tmp <= data_end, so when no newline is present, *tmp is read at tmp == data_end, one byte beyond the region filled by skb_header_pointer(). irc_buffer is kmalloc'd as MAX_SEARCH_SIZE + 1 bytes and datalen is capped at MAX_SEARCH_SIZE, so the stray read does not fault. The byte is uninitialized or stale; if it contains an ASCII digit, simple_strtoul will consume it and produce a wrong DCC IP or port in the conntrack expectation. The extra allocation byte is also a fragile guard: if the cap or allocation size changes, this becomes a real out-of-bounds read. Change the loop and its post-loop check to use strict less-than, consistent with the caller's exclusive-end convention. Update the function comment accordingly.

Affected products

• Linux Linux: from 2.6.12, before 5.10.261 (fixed in 5.10.261); from 5.11, before 5.15.212 (fixed in 5.15.212); from 5.16, before 6.1.178 (fixed in 6.1.178); from 6.2, before 6.6.145 (fixed in 6.6.145); from 6.7, before 6.12.97 (fixed in 6.12.97); from 6.13, before 6.18.40 (fixed in 6.18.40); …

Published 2026-08-28. Last modified 2026-08-29.