CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-53181 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: vsock/vmci: fix sk_ack_backlog leak on failed handshake When vmci_transport_recv_connecting_server() returns an error, vmci_transport_recv_listen() calls vsock_remove_pending() but never calls sk_acceptq_removed(). This leaves sk_ack_backlog incremented permanently. Repeated handshake failures (malformed packets, queue pair alloc failure, event subscribe failure) cause sk_ack_backlog to climb toward sk_max_ack_backlog. Once it reaches the limit the listener permanently refuses all new connections with -ECONNREFUSED, a silent denial of service requiring a process restart to recover. The two existing sk_acceptq_removed() calls in af_vsock.c do not cover this path: line 764 checks vsock_is_pending() which returns false after vsock_remove_pending(), and line 1889 is only reached on successful accept(). Fix by balancing sk_acceptq_added() with sk_acceptq_removed() on the error path.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-06-25
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 13 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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