CVE-2026-98622 — net/sched: act_ct: don't WARN on benign flow_offload_alloc() failure

Affected: Linux

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

net/sched: act_ct: don't WARN on benign flow_offload_alloc() failure

flow_offload_alloc() returns NULL when the conntrack entry is dying (e.g. raced with a conntrack flush) or when the GFP_ATOMIC allocation fails; both are expected under load and neither is a kernel bug. This path runs from softirq on every committed packet, so with panic_on_warn=1 an unprivileged user can panic the box just by racing a conntrack flush against a `tc ... action ct commit` classifier.

Reproduced with a custom repro under QEMU: a small, fixed set of UDP flows through `tc filter ... action ct commit` on lo, raced against threads flooding bare ctnetlink CT_DELETE (flush) requests. Hits WARNING: net/sched/act_ct.c:437 (tcf_ct_flow_table_add(), inlined into tcf_ct_act() in this build) within ~15s on the unpatched kernel; same setup is clean on the patched kernel. The fix itself is behavior-preserving: both branches already did `goto err_alloc` before and after, only the WARN is removed.

Most recent entries from all

CVE-2026-98622 — net/sched: act_ct: don't WARN on benign flow_offload_alloc() failure