critical · 9.8

netfilter: nf_conntrack_expect: use conntrack GC to reap expectations

CVE-2026-80668 · published 28 Aug 2026

How serious is it

  • Severity: critical, CVSS score 9.8 out of 10.
  • No exploit prediction (EPSS) score yet.
  • Not on the CISA list of exploited vulnerabilities.
  • No public exploit in Exploit-DB.

Is your app affected by CVE-2026-80668?

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Who is affected

  • Linux Linux: 5e1c1d22268ae710c238342c8030c21daf298168 to < 3d7b808ec35291ee75dcdb2b6fe5f587bfe9b1df, d52fa1fa7440676b8c238037a050ab008c22737f to < 02f7809a19fc88cfd9bc113a4bfe7add6305db39, bffcaad9afdfe45d7fc777397d3b83c1e3ebffe5 to < 7ec786f4230c2a9b2eaf97a2d45368933b49d2b2, bffcaad9afdfe45d7fc777397d3b83c1e3ebffe5 to < b8b09dc2bf35a00d4e0556b5d6308c7b917ebda2
  • Linux Linux: 7.0

How to check

  1. Find out whether you run the affected product and which version, then compare it with the versions above.

How to fix

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  1. Apply the vendor's update or mitigation from the references below. If there is none yet, limit exposure of the affected service until there is.
  2. If a vulnerable version was live, check your logs and rotate the secrets that server could read.

The advisory

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: netfilter: nf_conntrack_expect: use conntrack GC to reap expectations This patch replaces the timer API by GC worker approach for expectations, as it already happened in many other subsystems. Use the existing conntrack GC worker to iterate over the local list of expectations in the master conntrack to reap expired expectations. Check IPS_HELPER_BIT to run GC for expectations, set it on for nft_ct expectation which nevers sets it. Hold the expectation spinlock while iterating over the master conntrack expectation list to synchronize with nf_ct_remove_expectations(). This also performs runtime packet path garbage collection through the expectation insertion and lookup functions while walking over one of the chains of the global expectation hashtables. Unconfirmed conntrack entries are skipped since ct->ext can be reallocated and dying are skipped since those will be gone soon. Set on IPS_HELPER_BIT if the helper ct extension is added, then the new GC worker does not need to bump the ct refcount to check if the ct->ext helper is available. This removes the extra bump on the refcount for expectation timers, this allows to remove several nf_ct_expect_put() calls after the unlink, after this update only refcount remains at 1 while on the expectation hashes. This patch implicitly addresses a race with the existing timer API allowing an expectation to access a stale exp->master pointer which has been already released when expectation removal loses races with an expiring timer, ie. timer_del() reporting false. Add a new NF_CT_EXPECT_DEAD flag to reap this expectation via GC. This is needed by nf_conntrack_unexpect_related() which is called in error paths to invalidate newly created expectations that has been added into the hashes. These expectactions cannot be inmediately released as GC or nf_ct_remove_expectations() could race to make it. On expectation insert, the runtime GC reaps stale expectations before checking the expectation limit set by policy. Set current timestamp in nf_ct_expect_alloc(), then add the expectation policy timeout (or custom timeout specified added on top of this) to specify the expectation lifetime.

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References

Merged from CVE List. Last updated 26 Oct 2026. All vulnerabilities · RSS · JSON