CVE-2026-63872 – esp: fix page frag reference leak on skb_to_sgvec failure

CVE ID :CVE-2026-63872

Published : July 19, 2026, 3:16 p.m. | 23 minutes ago

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

esp: fix page frag reference leak on skb_to_sgvec failure

In esp_output_tail(), when esp->inplace is false, the old skb page frags
are replaced with a new page from the xfrm page_frag cache. The source
scatterlist (sg) is built from the old frags before the replacement, and
esp_ssg_unref() is responsible for releasing the old page references
after the crypto operation completes.

However, if the second skb_to_sgvec() call (which builds the destination
scatterlist from the new page) fails, the code jumps to error_free which
only calls kfree(tmp). The old page frag references captured in the
source scatterlist are never released:

1. sg[] is built from old frags via skb_to_sgvec() (no extra get_page)
2. nr_frags is set to 1 and frag[0] is replaced with the new page
3. Second skb_to_sgvec() fails -> goto error_free
4. kfree(tmp) frees the sg[] memory but old frags are not unref’d
5. kfree_skb() only releases frag[0] (the new page), not the old ones

Fix this by adding a bool parameter to esp_ssg_unref() that, when true,
unconditionally unrefs the source scatterlist frags without checking
req->src and req->dst, since those fields are not yet initialized by
aead_request_set_crypt() at the point of the error. Existing callers
pass false to preserve the original behavior.

The same issue exists in both esp4 and esp6 as the code is identical.

Severity: 0.0 | NA

Visit the link for more details, such as CVSS details, affected products, timeline, and more…