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Unrated severityNVD Advisory· Published Feb 4, 2026· Updated Feb 9, 2026

vsock/virtio: cap TX credit to local buffer size

CVE-2026-23086

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

vsock/virtio: cap TX credit to local buffer size

The virtio transports derives its TX credit directly from peer_buf_alloc, which is set from the remote endpoint's SO_VM_SOCKETS_BUFFER_SIZE value.

On the host side this means that the amount of data we are willing to queue for a connection is scaled by a guest-chosen buffer size, rather than the host's own vsock configuration. A malicious guest can advertise a large buffer and read slowly, causing the host to allocate a correspondingly large amount of sk_buff memory. The same thing would happen in the guest with a malicious host, since virtio transports share the same code base.

Introduce a small helper, virtio_transport_tx_buf_size(), that returns min(peer_buf_alloc, buf_alloc), and use it wherever we consume peer_buf_alloc.

This ensures the effective TX window is bounded by both the peer's advertised buffer and our own buf_alloc (already clamped to buffer_max_size via SO_VM_SOCKETS_BUFFER_MAX_SIZE), so a remote peer cannot force the other to queue more data than allowed by its own vsock settings.

On an unpatched Ubuntu 22.04 host (~64 GiB RAM), running a PoC with 32 guest vsock connections advertising 2 GiB each and reading slowly drove Slab/SUnreclaim from ~0.5 GiB to ~57 GiB; the system only recovered after killing the QEMU process. That said, if QEMU memory is limited with cgroups, the maximum memory used will be limited.

With this patch applied:

Before: MemFree: ~61.6 GiB Slab: ~142 MiB SUnreclaim: ~117 MiB

After 32 high-credit connections: MemFree: ~61.5 GiB Slab: ~178 MiB SUnreclaim: ~152 MiB

Only ~35 MiB increase in Slab/SUnreclaim, no host OOM, and the guest remains responsive.

Compatibility with non-virtio transports:

- VMCI uses the AF_VSOCK buffer knobs to size its queue pairs per socket based on the local vsk->buffer_* values; the remote side cannot enlarge those queues beyond what the local endpoint configured.

- Hyper-V's vsock transport uses fixed-size VMBus ring buffers and an MTU bound; there is no peer-controlled credit field comparable to peer_buf_alloc, and the remote endpoint cannot drive in-flight kernel memory above those ring sizes.

- The loopback path reuses virtio_transport_common.c, so it naturally follows the same semantics as the virtio transport.

This change is limited to virtio_transport_common.c and thus affects virtio-vsock, vhost-vsock, and loopback, bringing them in line with the "remote window intersected with local policy" behaviour that VMCI and Hyper-V already effectively have.

[Stefano: small adjustments after changing the previous patch] [Stefano: tweak the commit message]

Affected products

81

Patches

Vulnerability mechanics

References

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