Use After Free in Linux

CVE-2026-52947

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: qrtr: fix refcount saturation and potential UAF in qrtr_port_remove In qrtr_port_remove(), the socket reference count is decremented via __sock_put() before the port is removed from the qrtr_ports XArray and before the RCU grace period elapses. This breaks the fundamental RCU update paradigm. It exposes a race window where a concurrent RCU reader (such as qrtr_reset_ports() or qrtr_port_lookup()) can obtain a pointer to the socket from the XArray, and attempt to call sock_hold() on a socket whose reference count has already dropped to zero. This exact race condition was hit during syzkaller fuzzing, leading to the following refcount saturation warning and a potential Use-After-Free: refcount_t: saturated; leaking memory. WARNING: CPU: 3 PID: 1273 at lib/refcount.c:22 refcount_warn_saturate+0xae/0x1d0 Modules linked in: qrtr(+) bochs drm_shmem_helper ... Call Trace: <TASK> qrtr_reset_ports net/qrtr/af_qrtr.c:768 [inline] [qrtr] __qrtr_bind.isra.0+0x48b/0x570 net/qrtr/af_qrtr.c:805 [qrtr] qrtr_bind+0x17d/0x210 net/qrtr/af_qrtr.c:901 [qrtr] kernel_bind+0xe4/0x120 net/socket.c:3592 qrtr_ns_init+0x1a6/0x380 net/qrtr/ns.c:715 [qrtr] qrtr_proto_init+0x3b/0xff0 net/qrtr/af_qrtr.c:169 [qrtr] do_one_initcall+0xf5/0x5e0 init/main.c:1283 ... </TASK> Fix this by deferring the reference count decrement until after the xa_erase() and the synchronize_rcu() complete. (Note: The v1 of this patch incorrectly replaced __sock_put() with sock_put(). As Simon Horman pointed out, the callers of qrtr_port_remove() still hold a reference to the socket, so freeing the socket memory here would lead to a subsequent UAF in the caller. Thus, the __sock_put() is kept, but only repositioned to close the RCU race.)

Vulnerability class: Use-After-Free

Published 2026-06-24 · last modified 2026-07-14.