CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-45964 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: SUNRPC: fix gss_auth kref leak in gss_alloc_msg error path Commit 5940d1cf9f42 ("SUNRPC: Rebalance a kref in auth_gss.c") added a kref_get(&gss_auth->kref) call to balance the gss_put_auth() done in gss_release_msg(), but forgot to add a corresponding kref_put() on the error path when kstrdup_const() fails. If service_name is non-NULL and kstrdup_const() fails, the function jumps to err_put_pipe_version which calls put_pipe_version() and kfree(gss_msg), but never releases the gss_auth reference. This leads to a kref leak where the gss_auth structure is never freed. Add a forward declaration for gss_free_callback() and call kref_put() in the err_put_pipe_version error path to properly release the reference taken earlier.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-05-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel

Showing 1 representative product identities from 7 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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