NULL pointer dereference in Linux

CVE-2026-31579

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wireguard: device: use exit_rtnl callback instead of manual rtnl_lock in pre_exit wg_netns_pre_exit() manually acquires rtnl_lock() inside the pernet .pre_exit callback. This causes a hung task when another thread holds rtnl_mutex - the cleanup_net workqueue (or the setup_net failure rollback path) blocks indefinitely in wg_netns_pre_exit() waiting to acquire the lock. Convert to .exit_rtnl, introduced in commit 7a60d91c690b ("net: Add ->exit_rtnl() hook to struct pernet_operations."), where the framework already holds RTNL and batches all callbacks under a single rtnl_lock()/rtnl_unlock() pair, eliminating the contention window. The rcu_assign_pointer(wg->creating_net, NULL) is safe to move from .pre_exit to .exit_rtnl (which runs after synchronize_rcu()) because all RCU readers of creating_net either use maybe_get_net() - which returns NULL for a dying namespace with zero refcount - or access net->user_ns which remains valid throughout the entire ops_undo_list sequence. [ Jason: added __net_exit and __read_mostly annotations that were missing. ]

Published 2026-04-24 · last modified 2026-06-17.