Vulnerability in Linux

CVE-2026-89631

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: smb: client: reject a tree connect response whose byte count is too small CIFSTCon() bounds its strnlen() over the byte area with the server's ByteCount minus two, which for ByteCount 0 or 1 goes negative as an int and converts to a huge size_t. The later subtraction wraps the __u16 bytes_left, and that is what bounds cifs_strndup_from_utf16(): a bound of up to 65535 against a ~16 KB cifs_req_poolp object runs off the end of the slab object, and the bytes reach userspace through tcon->nativeFileSystem in /proc/fs/cifs/DebugData. Reject a byte area too small for what the parser consumes. Two bytes is the least it can consume, and no conformant response carries fewer. The new trace point is the 129th smb_eio_trace entry, which __mode(byte) cannot represent, so the attribute goes with it.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 9.1 (Critical). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.005 (39.5th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 39th percentile — 39.5% 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-2026-89631: held from 0.006 to 0.005.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.006 · newest: 0.005 · change: -0.002

Affected products

  • Linux — versions 2.6.30

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-89631?
CVE-2026-89631 is a critical-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 9.1/10. Published 2026-09-11.
How severe is CVE-2026-89631?
Critical severity. CVSS v3 base score is 9.1 out of 10.