CVE-2026-23270: net/sched: Only allow act_ct to bind to clsact/ingress qdiscs and shared blocks

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-23270 is a high (CVSS 7.8) Use After Free vulnerability in linux. EPSS estimates a 0.13% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 2.9% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 18-03-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 19-10-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net/sched: Only allow act_ct to bind to clsact/ingress qdiscs and shared blocks As Paolo said earlier [1]: "Since the blamed commit below, classify can return TC_ACT_CONSUMED while the current skb being held by the defragmentation engine. As reported by GangMin Kim, if such packet is that may cause a UaF when the defrag engine later on tries to tuch again such packet." act_ct was never meant to be used in the egress path, however some users are attaching it to egress today [2]. Attempting to reach a middle ground, we noticed that, while most qdiscs are not handling TC_ACT_CONSUMED, clsact/ingress qdiscs are. With that in mind, we address the issue by only allowing act_ct to bind to clsact/ingress qdiscs and shared blocks. That way it's still possible to attach act_ct to egress (albeit only with clsact). [1] https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/674b8cbfc385c6f37fb29a1de08d8fe5c2b0fbee.1771321118.git.pabeni@redhat.com/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/cc6bfb4a-4a2b-42d8-b9ce-7ef6644fb22b@ovn.org/

• CWE-416Use After FreeThe product reuses or references memory after it has been freed. At some point afterward, the memory may be allocated again and saved in another pointer, while the original pointer references a location somewhere within the new allocation. Any operations using the original pointer are no longer valid because the memory "belongs" to the code that operates on the new pointer.