CVE-2023-53698

LOWCVSS 7.8 · HIGH

Signal is active with 1 mentions in latest observed window

Immediate actions

  • Track advisory updates for patch or workaround availability

Recommended action window: Monitor and triage in normal cycle

NVD description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: xsk: fix refcount underflow in error path Fix a refcount underflow problem reported by syzbot that can happen when a system is running out of memory. If xp_alloc_tx_descs() fails, and it can only fail due to not having enough memory, then the error path is triggered. In this error path, the refcount of the pool is decremented as it has incremented before. However, the reference to the pool in the socket was not nulled. This means that when the socket is closed later, the socket teardown logic will think that there is a pool attached to the socket and try to decrease the refcount again, leading to a refcount underflow. I chose this fix as it involved adding just a single line. Another option would have been to move xp_get_pool() and the assignment of xs->pool to after the if-statement and using xs_umem->pool instead of xs->pool in the whole if-statement resulting in somewhat simpler code, but this would have led to much more churn in the code base perhaps making it harder to backport.

0.0/ 10 priority

Sources & remediation

Priority

LOW

Exploitation

NONE

PoC

NONE

Patch

NONE

Momentum

NONE

Threat summary

  • 1 mentions across 1 observed day

What's happening

  • 1 total mentions across 1 day

Deep dive

Activity timeline1 mentions / 1d
00111Mentions · 2026-09-23: 109-23
Full discourse1 post
  • Rahul@lock_it_ai

    Rare bug: AF_XDP refcount underflow on OOM. xp_put_pool() ran after TX-desc allocation failed, but xs->pool stayed non-NULL; close() decremented it again. CVE-2023-53698. Fix 85c2c79a07302fe68a1ad5cc449458cc559e314d. Concept: refcount underflow.

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