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Linux Kernel EUVDEUVD-2026-39305

| CVE-2026-53214 MEDIUM
NULL Pointer Dereference (CWE-476)
2026-06-25 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67 GHSA-5r3h-v82j-r7rr
5.5
CVSS 3.1 · NVD
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Attack ChainAIDerived

Hypothetical attack flow derived from CVE metadata – not a confirmed exploit chain

  1. Recon
    Obtain local shell or process with CAP_NET_ADMIN
  2. Delivery
    Send crafted IPv6 DELADDR netlink message
  3. Exploit
    Kernel invokes cleanup_prefix_route() via addrconf path
  4. Install
    addrconf_get_prefix_route() returns fib6_null_entry sentinel
  5. C2
    NULL fib6_table pointer dereferenced in spinlock acquisition
  6. Execute
    General protection fault triggers kernel panic
  7. Impact
    Full system availability loss

Vulnerability Assessment

Weakness
CWE
OWASP Top 10:2025
A10:2025 - Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions
ASVS 5.0
V16 - Security Logging and Error Handling Null pointer safety, defensive checks
MITRE ATT&CK

1 technique across 1 tactic: Impact

The technique list with ATT&CK links and the kill-chain view is part of the Basic plan and up.

Exploitation Conditions

Exploitation requires a local process with CAP_NET_ADMIN capability (or equivalent access in a network namespace, which is automatically granted to processes in a new user+network namespace on many Linux distributions). IPv6 must be enabled on the host, which is the default configuration on virtually all modern Linux systems. The trigger is the deletion of an IPv6 address via rtnetlink whose prefix route resolution returns the fib6_null_entry sentinel - this requires a specific address/prefix state that may not be trivially reproducible in all configurations, though the CVSS AC:L rating suggests no special race condition or complex precondition is required once CAP_NET_ADMIN is held. Exploitation is limited by: (1) mandatory local access - no network-adjacent or remote vector exists; (2) requirement for CAP_NET_ADMIN, which limits exposure to privileged users, container runtimes with elevated capabilities, or systems with permissive capability assignments; (3) impact is availability-only (kernel crash) with no data exfiltration or integrity modification possible.

Impact

The CVSS 3.1 vector AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H (score 5.5 Medium) accurately reflects real-world risk: exploitation requires local presence and at minimum CAP_NET_ADMIN, which is a meaningful barrier. There is no remote attack vector, no confidentiality or integrity impact, and the outcome is a kernel panic (availability loss). EPSS at 0.17% (6th percentile) corroborates that exploitation is unlikely to be widespread; this is not a remotely triggered or authentication-free vulnerability. The Linux kernel's ubiquitous deployment means the absolute population of potentially affected systems is enormous, but the practical risk is confined to threat models involving privileged local users, compromised containers with elevated network capabilities, or multi-tenant environments where CAP_NET_ADMIN may be granted more broadly. There is no KEV listing and no POC referenced in available data. The CVSS score and EPSS signals are consistent and non-conflicting: this is a legitimate but lower-priority patching item for most enterprise environments, elevated in priority for container orchestration platforms or systems where CAP_NET_ADMIN is delegated to untrusted workloads.

Exploit ScenarioDerived

A local user or process holding CAP_NET_ADMIN (for example, a containerised workload granted NET_ADMIN capability) constructs and transmits a DELADDR rtnetlink message requesting deletion of an IPv6 address whose corresponding prefix route resolves to the fib6_null_entry sentinel. The kernel's cleanup_prefix_route() dereferences the sentinel's NULL fib6_table pointer while attempting to acquire the table's spinlock, triggering a general protection fault detected by KASAN and causing an immediate kernel panic, crashing the entire host. No POC is publicly documented at the time of this analysis.

This Month Plan within 30 days. Why: MEDIUM severity (CVSS 4.0-6.9).
Patch available 0.2% exploitation probability (EPSS)

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AnalysisAIv1 – Jul 02, 2026

Null pointer dereference in the Linux kernel's IPv6 address configuration subsystem crashes the kernel when cleanup_prefix_route() receives the fib6_null_entry sentinel from addrconf_get_prefix_route() and attempts to access its NULL fib6_table pointer without validation. An authenticated local user holding CAP_NET_ADMIN can trigger this by sending a crafted IPv6 DELADDR netlink message, causing a general protection fault and system-wide denial of service. No public exploit or CISA KEV listing exists; EPSS is 0.17% (6th percentile), consistent with a privilege-gated local DoS affecting an extremely widely deployed target.

RemediationAI

The primary fix is to upgrade to a patched Linux kernel version: 6.6.143, 6.12.94, 6.18.36, 7.0.13, or 7.1 (stable). Patch commits are published at the kernel stable tree and can be found at https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/07d9a0870a178843cea44cfd58c27445dc94cf5f (and four additional sibling commits for different stable branches). Distribution maintainers (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, etc.) are expected to backport these fixes into their supported kernel packages. As a compensating control where immediate kernel patching is not possible, restricting CAP_NET_ADMIN to only fully trusted processes and users eliminates the attack surface - in container environments, avoid granting NET_ADMIN capability to untrusted workloads, as this is also the correct hardening posture independent of this CVE. Disabling IPv6 entirely (net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1) would also eliminate the vulnerable code path, but carries significant operational trade-offs for environments relying on IPv6 connectivity. Neither workaround has kernel-stability side effects, but disabling IPv6 is a broad change requiring testing.

Affected VersionsENISA

Linux 5eb902b8e7193cdcb33242af0a56502e6b5206e9 <07d9a0870a178843cea44cfd58c27445dc94cf5f
Linux patch: 6.12.94
Linux patch: 6.6.143
Linux bd12abe294c7738421bdfbc486f1909d02db30e9 <5f82b02b4059ddc06e4fcfd057bfb59fd6885cd2
Linux 5eb902b8e7193cdcb33242af0a56502e6b5206e9 <192df376a05c2db15564640f9da7e20907c1fa24
Linux 5eb902b8e7193cdcb33242af0a56502e6b5206e9 <653a2849305708f75260b5296f17b2a759ff9cc7
Linux patch: 6.18.36
Linux patch: 0
Linux 6.6.120 <6.6.143
Linux patch: 7.0.13
Linux 6.9
Linux 5eb902b8e7193cdcb33242af0a56502e6b5206e9 <b70c687b7cf267fb08586667a3946c8851cad672
Linux patch: 7.1

Affected Packages

euvd linux fix: 6.6.143

Source: OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities)

Affects your stack

Affects 1 package in euvd

Checking this CVE against your own stacks and servers is part of the Basic plan and up.

Technical ContextAI · show details

The vulnerability resides in net/ipv6/addrconf.c within the Linux kernel's IPv6 address configuration (addrconf) subsystem. The function addrconf_get_prefix_route() can legitimately return fib6_null_entry, a global sentinel object used throughout the IPv6 FIB (Forwarding Information Base) to represent the absence of a route - this object has a NULL fib6_table pointer by design. The caller cleanup_prefix_route() (addrconf.c:1280) failed to check for this sentinel before invoking _raw_spin_lock_bh on fib6_table->tb6_lock, a field that does not exist at address 0x0000000000000030 (NULL + 0x30 offset), triggering a KASAN null-ptr-deref in the range 0x30-0x37. The bug is reachable via the rtnetlink code path: sendmsg → netlink_sendmsg → netlink_unicast → rtnetlink_rcv_msg → inet6_rtm_deladdr → inet6_addr_del → ipv6_del_addr → cleanup_prefix_route. CWE-476 (NULL Pointer Dereference) precisely characterises the root cause. CPE cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:* covers all affected kernel versions across multiple stable branches. The sibling caller modify_prefix_route() had an analogous issue patched earlier by commit a747e02430df.

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  • Exploit and PoC references, threat intelligence from 22 sources

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Severity by source

NVD PRIMARY 5.5 MEDIUM
AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
vuln.today AI 5.5 MEDIUM

Local attack vector and low privileges (CAP_NET_ADMIN) required; pure DoS with no confidentiality or integrity impact from a kernel null-ptr-deref.

3.1 AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
4.0 AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
SUSE MEDIUM
Red Hat 5.5 LOW

Primary rating from NVD.

CVSS VectorNVD

Attack Vector
Local
Attack Complexity
Low
Privileges Required
Low
User Interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

Lifecycle Timeline

4
CVSS changed
Jul 02, 2026 - 21:07 NVD
5.5 (MEDIUM)
Patch available
Jun 25, 2026 - 10:32 EUVD
CVE Published
Jun 25, 2026 - 09:16 cve.org
UNKNOWN (no severity yet)
CVE Published
Jun 25, 2026 - 09:16 nvd
MEDIUM 5.5

DescriptionNVD

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

ipv6: Fix a potential NPD in cleanup_prefix_route()

addrconf_get_prefix_route() can return the fib6_null_entry sentinel entry which has a NULL fib6_table pointer. Therefore, before setting the route's expiration time, check that we are not working with this entry, as otherwise a NPD will be triggered [1].

Note that the other callers of addrconf_get_prefix_route() are not susceptible to this bug:

  1. addrconf_prefix_rcv(): Requests a route with the 'RTF_ADDRCONF |

RTF_PREFIX_RT' flags which are not set on fib6_null_entry.

  1. modify_prefix_route(): Fixed by commit a747e02430df ("ipv6: avoid

possible NULL deref in modify_prefix_route()").

  1. __ipv6_ifa_notify(): Calls ip6_del_rt() which specifically checks for

fib6_null_entry and returns an error.

[1] Oops: general protection fault, probably for non-canonical address 0xdffffc0000000006: 0000 [#1] SMP KASAN KASAN: null-ptr-deref in range [0x0000000000000030-0x0000000000000037] [...] Call Trace: <TASK> __kasan_check_byte (mm/kasan/common.c:573) lock_acquire.part.0 (kernel/locking/lockdep.c:5842 (discriminator 1)) _raw_spin_lock_bh (kernel/locking/spinlock.c:182 (discriminator 1)) cleanup_prefix_route (net/ipv6/addrconf.c:1280) ipv6_del_addr (net/ipv6/addrconf.c:1342) inet6_addr_del.isra.0 (net/ipv6/addrconf.c:3119) inet6_rtm_deladdr (net/ipv6/addrconf.c:4812) rtnetlink_rcv_msg (net/core/rtnetlink.c:6997) netlink_rcv_skb (net/netlink/af_netlink.c:2555) netlink_unicast (net/netlink/af_netlink.c:1344) netlink_sendmsg (net/netlink/af_netlink.c:1899) __sock_sendmsg (net/socket.c:802 (discriminator 4)) ____sys_sendmsg (net/socket.c:2698) ___sys_sendmsg (net/socket.c:2752) __sys_sendmsg (net/socket.c:2784) do_syscall_64 (arch/x86/entry/syscall_64.c:63 arch/x86/entry/syscall_64.c:94) entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe (arch/x86/entry/entry_64.S:121)

Threat Intelligence Overview

EPSS Score
0.2%
Top 94% exploitable
Prevalence
Ubiquitous
Linux kernel underlies the vast majority of servers, cloud, and container infrastructure globally
Data Quality
5 sources
Confidence: Medium

How this decision was reached

The engine reads each signal below and applies a fixed list of rules from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sets the recommended action – like a statement, every line is shown.

SignalValue
Severity MEDIUM
CISA KEV No
Public POC No
EPSS 0.2%
Patch available Yes
Active threat No
Deciding rule
MEDIUM severity (CVSS 4.0-6.9)
What every action level means
Emergency Immediate action required. Criteria: CRITICAL + in CISA KEV (actively exploited) without patch, OR CRITICAL + EPSS > 30% without patch, OR CRITICAL + active threat signals without patch.
Act Now Prioritize within 24-48h. Criteria: in KEV with patch available, OR CRITICAL + public POC, OR HIGH + EPSS > 10%, OR CRITICAL + active threat, OR any CRITICAL severity.
This Week Schedule remediation this week. Criteria: HIGH severity (CVSS 7.0-8.9). Patch within normal change window.
This Month Plan within 30 days. Criteria: MEDIUM severity (CVSS 4.0-6.9), lower exploitation probability. Include in regular patch cycle.
Monitor Track and reassess. Criteria: LOW severity (CVSS 0.1-3.9), minimal exploitation risk. No immediate action needed.

SSVC AssessmentENISA

SSVC Decision· derived
Scheduled
Exploitation· derived
None
System Exposure· derived
Small
Automatable· derived
No
Human Impact· derived
High

Priority Score

28
Low Medium High Critical
KEV: 0
EPSS: 0
CVSS: +28
PoC: 0
Weaponized: 0
Threat intel: 0
Gov advisory: 0

Attack Technique

A null pointer dereference occurs when a program attempts to access memory through a pointer that has been set to NULL (address 0x0).

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Vendor StatusVendor

SUSE

Severity: Moderate
Product Status
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 SP7 Not-Affected
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 SP7 Not-Affected
SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 SP7 Not-Affected
SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 SP7 Not-Affected
SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 16.0 Affected

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