Service interruption via Netlink length overflow
Published May 1, 2025 · Updated May 11, 2026
Integer overflow in Linux kernel Netlink message handling allows local users to interrupt service via oversized error-message data. On 32-bit systems, open-coded nlmsgerr payload calculations can wrap beyond SIZE_MAX before allocation, while later memcpy operations use the unwrapped message length. Local low-privileged access to Netlink is required, and the resulting out-of-bounds read can destabilize the kernel without granting data modification.
Summary
What happened
Integer overflow in Linux kernel Netlink message handling allows local users to interrupt service via oversized error-message data. On 32-bit systems, open-coded nlmsgerr payload calculations can wrap beyond SIZE_MAX before allocation, while later memcpy operations use the unwrapped message length. Local low-privileged access to Netlink is required, and the resulting out-of-bounds read can destabilize the kernel without granting data modification.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2022-49766
- Published
- May 1, 2025
- Updated
- May 11, 2026
- Vendor
- The Linux Kernel Organization
- Product
- Linux
- Classifications
- T1499
- Attack vector
- local
- Privileges
- authenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- May 1, 2025CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- May 11, 2026Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
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- Affected versionversion=1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 <710d21fdff9a98d621cd4e64167f3ef8af4e2fd1
- Affected versionversion=1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 <aff4eb16f589c3af322a2582044bca365381fcd6
- Affected versionversion=2.6.12
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Attacks
What attackers are doing with it
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Weakness, pattern, technique
Public exploit references
No public exploit references are available in this record.
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Technologies
Your stack
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Your stack
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