CVE-2023-53698

HIGH
MEDIUM Priority: 0.01 BB Relevance: 41/100
Published: 2025-10-22 Modified: 2026-10-28 First seen: 2026-10-29 Status: active

Attack Surface

Low Complexity No Interaction Conf. Impact Integ. Impact

CVSS Vector Breakdown

AV: Local
AC: Low
PR: Low
UI: None
S: Unchanged
C: High
I: High
A: High

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.

Bug Bounty Relevance

41 / 100
✓ Low complexity
✓ No user interaction

CVSS Score

7.8 / 10.0 v3.1
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

EPSS — Exploitation Probability

0.16%
Raw Score 0.001640
Percentile 5.6%
Date 2026-10-29

EPSS Trend

2026-10-29
0.00164
2026-10-28
0.00164

Intelligence Sources

nvd ref →