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High severity7.8NVD Advisory· Published Feb 14, 2026· Updated Apr 3, 2026

CVE-2026-23209

CVE-2026-23209

Description

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

macvlan: fix error recovery in macvlan_common_newlink()

valis provided a nice repro to crash the kernel:

ip link add p1 type veth peer p2 ip link set address 00:00:00:00:00:20 dev p1 ip link set up dev p1 ip link set up dev p2

ip link add mv0 link p2 type macvlan mode source ip link add invalid% link p2 type macvlan mode source macaddr add 00:00:00:00:00:20

ping -c1 -I p1 1.2.3.4

He also gave a very detailed analysis:

The issue is triggered when a new macvlan link is created with MACVLAN_MODE_SOURCE mode and MACVLAN_MACADDR_ADD (or MACVLAN_MACADDR_SET) parameter, lower device already has a macvlan port and register_netdevice() called from macvlan_common_newlink() fails (e.g. because of the invalid link name).

In this case macvlan_hash_add_source is called from macvlan_change_sources() / macvlan_common_newlink():

This adds a reference to vlan to the port's vlan_source_hash using macvlan_source_entry.

vlan is a pointer to the priv data of the link that is being created.

When register_netdevice() fails, the error is returned from macvlan_newlink() to rtnl_newlink_create():

if (ops->newlink) err = ops->newlink(dev, &params, extack); else err = register_netdevice(dev); if (err < 0) { free_netdev(dev); goto out; }

and free_netdev() is called, causing a kvfree() on the struct net_device that is still referenced in the source entry attached to the lower device's macvlan port.

Now all packets sent on the macvlan port with a matching source mac address will trigger a use-after-free in macvlan_forward_source().

With all that, my fix is to make sure we call macvlan_flush_sources() regardless of @create value whenever "goto destroy_macvlan_port;" path is taken.

Many thanks to valis for following up on this issue.

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Affected products

389

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