Linux Kernel TCP Flaw CVE-2026-98432 Rated CVSS 9.8, Patches Lagging on Some Distros
A use-after-free vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-98432 and rated CVSS 9.8 has been confirmed in the Linux kernel's IPv4 TCP connection handling. It stems from a race condition in which IP options are transferred by pointer during handshake completion, allowing memory freed on one CPU to be read by another. Affected kernels date back to version 4.4, and a two-line fix by Google's Eric Dumazet, reported by Anthropic's Xinyang Ge, was merged on October 5. Anthropic said an unreleased internal model built a working exploit granting unauthenticated root access on an MPTCP listener within 53 minutes. As of October 30, Debian and Oracle Linux had fixes while Ubuntu and RHEL patches were still unavailable, so blocking TCP packets with IP options using nftables was recommended as an interim measure.
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