CVE-2026-98284 — netlink: do not free nlk->groups while lockless readers can use it

Affected: Linux

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

netlink: do not free nlk->groups while lockless readers can use it

netlink_realloc_groups() uses krealloc() under netlink_table_grab(). Whenever NLGRPSZ(groups) lands in a different kmalloc bucket, the old bitmap is freed immediately.

Two readers of nlk->groups / nlk->ngroups do not hold the netlink table lock:

1) sk_diag_dump_groups(). Hashed (bound) sockets are dumped from the rhashtable walk in __netlink_diag_dump(), which only holds RCU. Only the mc_list part of the dump takes nl_table_lock.

2) netlink_native_seq_show() (/proc/net/netlink), whose walk has been lockless since commit 21e4902aea80 ("netlink: Lockless lookup with RCU grace period in socket release").

Both can read a freed buffer, and sk_diag_dump_groups() can also read past the end of the old (smaller) buffer if it happens to load the old @groups pointer together with the new @ngroups value, copying the result into a NETLINK_DIAG_GROUPS attribute.

This is the same class of bug that commit f773608026ee ("netlink: access nlk groups safely in netlink bind and getname") fixed for bind() and getname(); these two readers were missed. Simply grabbing the table lock in sk_diag_dump_groups() is not an option, because it is also called with nl_table_lock already held from the mc_list section of the dump.

Make the lockless readers safe instead:

- Allocate a new bitmap and free the old one after an RCU grace period, instead of rel…

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CVE-2026-98284 — netlink: do not free nlk->groups while lockless readers can use it