IT

Tracker / CVE-2025-71097

CVE-2025-71097

Medium 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ipv4: Fix reference count leak when using error routes with nexthop objects When a nexthop object is deleted, it is marked as dead and then fib_table_flush() is called to flush all the routes that are using the dead nexthop. The current logic in fib_table_flush() is to only flush error routes (e.g., blackhole) when it is called as part of network namespace dismantle (i.e., with flush_all=true). Therefore, error routes are not flushed when their nexthop object is deleted: # ip link add name dummy1 up type dummy # ip nexthop add id 1 dev dummy1 # ip route add 198.51.100.1/32 nhid 1 # ip route add blackhole 198.51.100.2/32 nhid 1 # ip nexthop del id 1 # ip route show blackhole 198.51.100.2 nhid 1 dev dummy1 As such, they keep holding a reference on the nexthop object which in turn holds a reference on the nexthop device, resulting in a reference count leak: # ip link del dev dummy1 [ 70.516258] unregister_netdevice: waiting for dummy1 to become free. Usage count = 2 Fix by flushing error routes when their nexthop is marked as dead. IPv6 does not suffer from this problem.

Affected products and versions

linux linux_kernel
linux linux_kernel · 5.11 → 5.15.198
linux linux_kernel · 5.16 → 6.1.160
linux linux_kernel · 5.3.1 → 5.10.248
linux linux_kernel · 6.13 → 6.18.4
linux linux_kernel · 6.2 → 6.6.120
linux linux_kernel · 6.7 → 6.12.64

Analysis

This page is not indexable yet.Until it carries original analysis — what it actually exposes, how to check in two minutes whether a system was touched, what to do if it was — the page stays noindex. The database decides that, not the template.

References