CVE-2026-23351: linux Use After Free

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-23351 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 1.9% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 25-03-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 19-10-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: netfilter: nft_set_pipapo: split gc into unlink and reclaim phase Yiming Qian reports Use-after-free in the pipapo set type: Under a large number of expired elements, commit-time GC can run for a very long time in a non-preemptible context, triggering soft lockup warnings and RCU stall reports (local denial of service). We must split GC in an unlink and a reclaim phase. We cannot queue elements for freeing until pointers have been swapped. Expired elements are still exposed to both the packet path and userspace dumpers via the live copy of the data structure. call_rcu() does not protect us: dump operations or element lookups starting after call_rcu has fired can still observe the free'd element, unless the commit phase has made enough progress to swap the clone and live pointers before any new reader has picked up the old version. This a similar approach as done recently for the rbtree backend in commit 35f83a75529a ("netfilter: nft_set_rbtree: don't gc elements on insert").

• 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 Any operations using the original pointer are no longer valid because the memory "belongs" to the code that operates on the new pointer.