Buffer overflow in Linux

CVE-2026-43186

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ipv6: ioam: fix heap buffer overflow in __ioam6_fill_trace_data() On the receive path, __ioam6_fill_trace_data() uses trace->nodelen to decide how much data to write for each node. It trusts this field as-is from the incoming packet, with no consistency check against trace->type (the 24-bit field that tells which data items are present). A crafted packet can set nodelen=0 while setting type bits 0-21, causing the function to write ~100 bytes past the allocated region (into skb_shared_info), which corrupts adjacent heap memory and leads to a kernel panic. Add a shared helper ioam6_trace_compute_nodelen() in ioam6.c to derive the expected nodelen from the type field, and use it: - in ioam6_iptunnel.c (send path, existing validation) to replace the open-coded computation; - in exthdrs.c (receive path, ipv6_hop_ioam) to drop packets whose nodelen is inconsistent with the type field, before any data is written. Per RFC 9197, bits 12-21 are each short (4-octet) fields, so they are included in IOAM6_MASK_SHORT_FIELDS (changed from 0xff100000 to 0xff1ffc00).

Vulnerability class: Buffer Overflow

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 9.8 (Critical). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.009 (56.9th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 57th percentile — 56.9% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-43186: held from 0.006 to 0.009.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.006 · newest: 0.009 · change: +0.002

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-43186?
CVE-2026-43186 is a critical-severity vulnerability in Linux, classified under Out-of-bounds Write. CVSS score: 9.8/10. Published 2026-05-06.
How severe is CVE-2026-43186?
Critical severity. CVSS v3 base score is 9.8 out of 10.