Linux Kernel: NULL Pointer Dereference (CVE-2026-99288)
Published Last modified Sources: Debian, Msrc Update Guide, CVE.org, EUVD, BSI
What is affected, what to do
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: inet: reject unhashed sockets during established lookups TCP established ehash lookups are lockless. The socket caches involved use SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU, so memory can be reused before an RCU reader that retained its old address has finished.
Update Linux Kernel to version 6.12.117, Linux Kernel to version 6.18.63, Linux Kernel to version 7.3.4.
- Affected
- Linux Kernel
lt 4.4..6.12.117 - Linux Kernel
lt 6.13..6.18.63 - Linux Kernel
lt 6.19..7.3.4 - Linux Kernel
lt 7.4..7.4-rc2
- Linux Kernel
- Fixed in
- Linux Kernel
6.12.117 - Linux Kernel
6.18.63 - Linux Kernel
7.3.4 - Linux Kernel
7.4-rc2
- Linux Kernel
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Metrics
5.9
XIEM Effective CVSS
Highest available CVSS rating from NVD and vendor data.
Source: Vendor (CNA), CVSS v3
5.9
CVSS v3
Severity Medium on the scale from 0 to 10.
Source: Debian, Msrc Update Guide, CVE.org, EUVD, BSI
0.2 %
EPSS score
Low — model estimates < 1% exploitation likelihood.
Source: FIRST EPSS, percentile 4.7
Show all metrics
- Severity
- Medium
Priority (0–325)
The priority score is a consolidated metric that condenses several individual signals into a single, action-guiding ranking: technical severity (CVSS), exploitation likelihood (EPSS), known-exploited status (KEV) and the context of the affected asset. The aim is to answer the only truly important question in vulnerability management: what first?
Read in glossary- 59.67 Methodology
Exploit maturity
An exploit is code or a technique that specifically uses a concrete vulnerability to force unintended behaviour — such as executing code or escalating privileges. It is the tool that turns a theoretical flaw into a practical attack.
Read in glossary- no public PoC known
XIEM Effective CVSS
XIEM® is the tiered managed-security operating model from NEOSEC and a registered trademark of NEOSEC GmbH. It extends classic SIEM — the central collection, normalisation and correlation of security-relevant events — with endpoint forensics, network visibility and deception technology, and consolidates them into three building tiers: Sentry, Orchestrate and Command.
Read in glossary- 5.9 Methodology
CVSS v3
CVSS is the globally established, open standard for assessing the technical severity of a vulnerability on a scale from 0 to 10. It describes how easily a flaw can be exploited and what damage it can cause — but not how likely its actual exploitation is. CVSS and the complementary EPSS deliberately answer different questions.
Read in glossary- 5.9
EPSS score
The EPSS score is the absolute model output for an individual vulnerability: the estimated probability of real-world exploitation within the next 30 days, expressed as a value between 0 and 1 (i.e. 0 % to 100 %). A score of 0.42 means „the model estimates a 42 % chance of real-world exploitation within 30 days“.
Read in glossary- 0.2 %
- Low — model estimates < 1% exploitation likelihood.
EPSS percentile
The EPSS percentile is the relative position of a vulnerability within all EPSS-scored CVEs, expressed as a value between 0 and 1. A percentile of 0.90 means „this CVE has a higher EPSS score than 90 % of all other scored CVEs“. Unlike the EPSS score, it is not a probability — but a positioning within a ranking.
Read in glossary- 4.7
- Low — this CVE sits in the lower 10% of all CVEs scored today.
KEV status
The KEV catalogue is a list maintained by the US authority CISA of vulnerabilities for which active exploitation in the wild has been confirmed. It answers not the question „how severe?“ but „is it already being attacked?“ — thereby sharply prioritising patching.
Read in glossary- —
- Published
Detection rules
No NEOSEC detection rule is available for this vulnerability yet.
Classification under NIS2 and CRA
Rule-based classification from exploitation status and severity. It does not replace a case-by-case assessment.
NIS2
NIS2 is EU Directive (EU) 2022/2555 to raise the level of cybersecurity across the Union. It substantially broadens obligations compared with the first NIS directive: more sectors, mandatory risk management, staged reporting duties and personal accountability of senior management.
Read in glossary- Handle the vulnerability in regular vulnerability handling under Art. 21(2)(e) NIS2.
CRA
The CRA is EU Regulation (EU) 2024/2847 setting horizontal cybersecurity requirements for „products with digital elements“ — from industrial controllers and software to connected consumer devices. For the first time manufacturers must ensure security across the entire product lifecycle, handle vulnerabilities and provide security updates.
Read in glossary- From 11.12.2027, Annex I Part II CRA requires manufacturers of affected products with digital elements to handle vulnerabilities without delay and provide security updates.
ISO/IEC 27001
ISO/IEC 27001 is the internationally leading standard for an information security management system (ISMS). It describes a risk-based, process-oriented framework to systematically plan, implement, review and improve information security.
Read in glossary- Control A.8.8, management of technical vulnerabilities: assess relevance to your systems, plan remediation and keep evidence.
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: inet: reject unhashed sockets during established lookups TCP established ehash lookups are lockless. The socket caches involved use SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU, so memory can be reused before an RCU reader that retained its old address has finished. After a tuple match, __inet_lookup_established() and __inet6_lookup_established() acquire a reference and repeat the tuple check. They do not check whether the new object is hashed. If the address is reused for a socket with the same tuple, the lookup can acquire a reference to the new object and return it while its nulls node is unhashed. A PoC that drives reuse with a SYN cookie request socket reproduced the crash. The new request socket is unhashed and has a NULL rsk_listener. A lookup that had loaded the address of the old request socket acquired the reference published by tcp_get_cookie_sock() and returned the new object. tcp_v4_rcv() then read sk_state through the NULL listener. The resulting crash was: BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000012 #PF: supervisor read access in kernel mode #PF: error_code(0x0000) - not-present page ... Oops: Oops: 0000 [#1] SMP NOPTI CPU: 4 UID: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper/4 Not tainted 7.3.0-00591-g0e135910deec #1 PREEMPT(lazy) ... RIP: 0010:tcp_v4_rcv+0x44e/0x1280 ... R10: 0000000000000001 R11: 00000000024ca8c0 R12: 0000000000000000 ... CR2: 0000000000000012 CR3: 0000000103d50004 CR4: 0000000000770ef0 ... Call Trace: <IRQ> ? raw_local_deliver+0xae/0x240 ip_protocol_deliver_rcu+0x2d/0x180 ip_local_deliver_finish+0x84/0x100 ip_sublist_rcv_finish+0x5f/0x70 ip_sublist_rcv+0x12a/0x1d0 ip_list_rcv+0xfd/0x130 __netif_receive_skb_list_core+0x223/0x250 netif_receive_skb_list_internal+0x1d2/0x2c0 ? try_fill_recv+0x39/0x7b0 napi_complete_done+0x74/0x170 virtnet_poll+0x445/0x600 __napi_poll+0x27/0x1e0 net_rx_action+0x2fe/0x3b0 handle_softirqs+0xc2/0x2c0 __irq_exit_rcu+0x74/0xd0 common_interrupt+0x7f/0x90 </IRQ> ... Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt After taking a reference, check whether the nulls node is unhashed in both IPv4 and IPv6 established lookups. If it is unhashed or the tuple no longer matches, drop the reference and restart the lookup. Lookups racing with the TIME_WAIT hashdance, or with a request being replaced by its child, now restart and find the new socket instead of returning the old one. Request sockets that were never inserted into ehash can have a nonzero refcount, and a stale lookup can hold a transient reference. Therefore, when SYN cookie, Fast Open, and request migration paths fail after setting a nonzero refcount, release the references held by those paths with reqsk_put() instead of freeing the request directly.
Source: Debian Security Advisories, Microsoft Security Update Guide, cvelistv5, NVD (NIST), ENISA EUVD, CVE.org (MITRE), BSI WID Portal, BSI CSAF
Affected products
The following versions are affected. Older releases of the same product line are also vulnerable unless stated otherwise.
| Affected versions | Fixed in | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Linux | Linux |
|
|
Vendors and products
Affected operating systems
| Linux | debian | linux | trixie |
References & sources
- git.kernel.orgstable/c/d69100340b4cae08d40f898f1b601032403f6be6euvd
- git.kernel.orgstable/c/8e5172cbd227fae32f3313cba1f3e1b9edb5c4fdeuvd
- git.kernel.orgstable/c/eb8a2d156f2c1d862fffdfd1b3432bfbcd939879euvd
- NVD (NIST)vuln/detail/CVE-2026-99288euvd
- git.kernel.orgstable/c/4e2b3ef19e0e04adca38442f07dd6bc93c712bf1
Changes to this CVE
Who changed this CVE and when: NVD (analysis, affected products, CVSS), the CVE publisher (CNA) and additional providers such as CISA (ADP).
Record modifiedLinux
Show 2 original changes
Individual changes of this event as published by NVD Type Action Before After Affected versions (publisher) added —Affected value modified. <a href="https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/blob/main/cves/2026/99xxx/CVE-2026-99288.json">CVE-2026-99288</a>Reference added —https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4e2b3ef19e0e04adca38442f07dd6bc93c712bf1Source identifier: 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
ReceivedLinux
Description added or changed
Show 5 original changes
Individual changes of this event as published by NVD Type Action Before After Description added —In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: inet: reject unhashed sockets during established lookups TCP established ehash lookups are lockless. The socket caches involved use SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU, so memory can be reused before an RCU reader that retained its old address has finished. After a tuple match, __inet_lookup_established() and __inet6_lookup_established() acquire a reference and repeat the tuple check. They do not check whether the new object is hashed. If the address is reused for a socket with the same tuple, the lookup can acquire a reference to the new object and return it while its nulls node is unhashed. A PoC that drives reuse with a SYN cookie request socket reproduced the crash. The new request socket is unhashed and has a NULL rsk_listener. A lookup that had loaded the address of the old request socket acquired the reference published by tcp_get_cookie_sock() and returned the new object. tcp_v4_rcv() then read sk_state through the NULL listener. The resulting crash was: BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000012 #PF: supervisor read access in kernel mode #PF: error_code(0x0000) - not-present page ... Oops: Oops: 0000 [#1] SMP NOPTI CPU: 4 UID: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper/4 Not tainted 7.3.0-00591-g0e135910deec #1 PREEMPT(lazy) ... RIP: 0010:tcp_v4_rcv+0x44e/0x1280 ... R10: 0000000000000001 R11: 00000000024ca8c0 R12: 0000000000000000 ... CR2: 0000000000000012 CR3: 0000000103d50004 CR4: 0000000000770ef0 ... Call Trace: <IRQ> ? raw_local_deliver+0xae/0x240 ip_protocol_deliver_rcu+0x2d/0x180 ip_local_deliver_finish+0x84/0x100 ip_sublist_rcv_finish+0x5f/0x70 ip_sublist_rcv+0x12a/0x1d0 ip_list_rcv+0xfd/0x130 __netif_receive_skb_list_core+0x223/0x250 netif_receive_skb_list_internal+0x1d2/0x2c0 ? try_fill_recv+0x39/0x7b0 napi_complete_done+0x74/0x170 virtnet_poll+0x445/0x600 __napi_poll+0x27/0x1e0 net_rx_action+0x2fe/0x3b0 handle_softirqs+0xc2/0x2c0 __irq_exit_rcu+0x74/0xd0 common_interrupt+0x7f/0x90 </IRQ> ... Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt After taking a reference, check whether the nulls node is unhashed in both IPv4 and IPv6 established lookups. If it is unhashed or the tuple no longer matches, drop the reference and restart the lookup. Lookups racing with the TIME_WAIT hashdance, or with a request being replaced by its child, now restart and find the new socket instead of returning the old one. Request sockets that were never inserted into ehash can have a nonzero refcount, and a stale lookup can hold a transient reference. Therefore, when SYN cookie, Fast Open, and request migration paths fail after setting a nonzero refcount, release the references held by those paths with reqsk_put() instead of freeing the request directly.Affected versions (publisher) added —New affected value received. <a href="https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/blob/main/cves/2026/99xxx/CVE-2026-99288.json">CVE-2026-99288</a>Reference added —https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8e5172cbd227fae32f3313cba1f3e1b9edb5c4fdReference added —https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d69100340b4cae08d40f898f1b601032403f6be6Reference added —https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/eb8a2d156f2c1d862fffdfd1b3432bfbcd939879Source identifier: 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
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<a href="https://intel.neosec.eu/en/cve/CVE-2026-99288"><img src="https://intel.neosec.eu/badge/cve/CVE-2026-99288.svg?lang=en" alt="CVE-2026-99288 – NEOSEC Intel" height="20"></a>