CVE-2026-98584: net/sched: fix potential stack infoleak in em_text_dump()

Published Oct 18, 2026
·
Updated

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

net/sched: fix potential stack infoleak in emtextdump()

emtextdump() allocates struct tcfemtext on the stack without zeroing it. strscpy() writes the algorithm name and a NUL terminator into conf.algo[], leaving the remaining bytes uninitialised. nlaputnohdr() then copies the full struct to the netlink response.

KMSAN on Linux 7.2-rc6 reports two kernel-infoleak splats from this path, one triggered via "tc filter show" and one via a raw RTMGETTFILTER dump:

BUG: KMSAN: kernel-infoleak in copytoiter+0x1c9/0x2620 nlaputnohdr+0x83/0x130 emtextdump+0x291/0x550 Local variable conf created at: emtextdump+0x5d/0x550 Bytes 168-179 of 199 are uninitialized

I am not certain whether this constitutes a real security problem in practice: the test was conducted in a controlled KMSAN environment and the leaked stack bytes may or may not carry sensitive data on actual production kernels. I am reporting it because KMSAN flagged it as a kernel-infoleak and the fix is straightforward. I can provide a userspace reproducer on request.

The original code used strncpy() which zero-pads to the destination size. Commit b04202d6065c ("net/sched: replace strncpy with strscpy") replaced it with strscpy(), which does not pad, creating this condition. Zero-initialising the struct closes it.

Affected Software

1 affected component
Linux Linux kernel

Event History

Oct 18, 2026
CVE Published
via MITRE·03:18 PM
Data Sourced
via MITRE·03:18 PM
Description
Data Sourced
via NVD·04:17 PM
Description

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