CVE-2023-53338

Medium

Elevated severity or exploit probability.

CVSS base

9.8 CRITICAL

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

EPSS — probability of exploitation (30 days)

0.5%

44.3th percentile

CISA KEV

Not listed

Weakness / dates

CWE-416

Published 2025-09-17 · modified 2026-08-04

CVSS breakdown

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Attack Vector	N	Network
Attack Complexity	L	Low
Privileges Required	N	None
User Interaction	N	None
Scope	U	Unchanged
Confidentiality	H	High
Integrity	H	High
Availability	H	High

Timeline

2025-09-17 — Published (NVD)
2026-08-04 — Last modified (NVD)

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: lwt: Fix return values of BPF xmit ops BPF encap ops can return different types of positive values, such like NET_RX_DROP, NET_XMIT_CN, NETDEV_TX_BUSY, and so on, from function skb_do_redirect and bpf_lwt_xmit_reroute. At the xmit hook, such return values would be treated implicitly as LWTUNNEL_XMIT_CONTINUE in ip(6)_finish_output2. When this happens, skbs that have been freed would continue to the neighbor subsystem, causing use-after-free bug and kernel crashes. To fix the incorrect behavior, skb_do_redirect return values can be simply discarded, the same as tc-egress behavior. On the other hand, bpf_lwt_xmit_reroute returns useful errors to local senders, e.g. PMTU information. Thus convert its return values to avoid the conflict with LWTUNNEL_XMIT_CONTINUE.

Affected

linux

References

Official: NVD · CVE.org