CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-52981 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: neigh: let neigh_xmit take skb ownership neigh_xmit always releases the skb, except when no neighbour table is found. But even the first added user of neigh_xmit (mpls) relied on neigh_xmit to release the skb (or queue it for tx). sashiko reported: If neigh_xmit() is called with an uninitialized neighbor table (for example, NEIGH_ND_TABLE when IPv6 is disabled), it returns -EAFNOSUPPORT and bypasses its internal out_kfree_skb error path. Because the return value of neigh_xmit() is ignored here, does this leak the SKB? Assume full ownership and remove the last code path that doesn't xmit or free skb.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-06-24
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 7.1

Showing 2 representative product identities from 6 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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