SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityModified

CVE-2026-31610

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ksmbd: fix mechToken leak when SPNEGO decode fails after token alloc The kernel ASN.1 BER decoder calls action callbacks incrementally as it walks the input.

MEDIUM 5.5EPSS 0.14%

Does this matter?

Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.14%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ksmbd: fix mechToken leak when SPNEGO decode fails after token alloc The kernel ASN.1 BER decoder calls action callbacks incrementally as it walks the input. When ksmbd_decode_negTokenInit() reaches the mechToken [2] OCTET STRING element, ksmbd_neg_token_alloc() allocates conn->mechToken immediately via kmemdup_nul(). If a later element in the same blob is malformed, then the decoder will return nonzero after the allocation is already live. This could happen if mechListMIC [3] overrunse the enclosing SEQUENCE. decode_negotiation_token() then sets conn->use_spnego = false because both the negTokenInit and negTokenTarg grammars failed. The cleanup at the bottom of smb2_sess_setup() is gated on use_spnego: if (conn->use_spnego && conn->mechToken) { kfree(conn->mechToken); conn->mechToken = NULL; } so the kfree is skipped, causing the mechToken to never be freed. This codepath is reachable pre-authentication, so untrusted clients can cause slow memory leaks on a server without even being properly authenticated. Fix this up by not checking check for use_spnego, as it's not required, so the memory will always be properly freed. At the same time, always free the memory in ksmbd_conn_free() incase some other failure path forgot to free it.

CVSS 3.1
5.5 MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS
0.14% probability · 3th percentile
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-401
Affected
linux/linux kernel
Source
416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.