CVE-2026-74465 — net: openvswitch: fix potential UAF on meter attach failure

Affected: Linux

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

net: openvswitch: fix potential UAF on meter attach failure

While attaching a newly created meter attach_meter() function makes the new meter visible to other CPUs but can still fail afterwards. On failure, it detaches the meter back and returns an error.

However, this is an unexpected behavior for the ovs_meter_cmd_set() that uses a plain kfree(meter) on attach failure without waiting for RCU readers to stop using it, assuming it was never visible.

This is never a problem for ovs-vswitchd as it always creates meters before creating any flows that use them. But the UAF can be triggered with a custom application using uAPI:

BUG: KASAN: slab-use-after-free in ovs_meter_execute (net/openvswitch/meter.c:653) Read of size 8 at addr ffff88810d152650 by task meter/2508

Call Trace: ovs_meter_execute (net/openvswitch/meter.c:653) do_execute_actions (net/openvswitch/actions.c:1407) ovs_execute_actions (net/openvswitch/actions.c:1584) ovs_packet_cmd_execute (net/openvswitch/datapath.c:703) ... netlink_sendmsg (af_netlink.c:1900)

Allocated by task 2519: __kasan_kmalloc (mm/kasan/common.c:398 mm/kasan/common.c:415) ovs_meter_cmd_set (net/openvswitch/meter.c:422) ... netlink_sendmsg (af_netlink.c:1900)

Freed by task 2519: kfree (mm/slub.c:2705 mm/slub.c:6405 mm/slub.c:6720) ovs_meter_cmd_set (net/openvswitch/meter.c:479) ... netlink_sendmsg (af_netlink.c:1900)

Fix that by making…

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CVE-2026-74465 — net: openvswitch: fix potential UAF on meter attach failure