CVE-2026-31610 ksmbd: fix mechToken leak when SPNEGO decode fails after token alloc

What is CVE-2026-31610?

CVE-2026-31610 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 24 Apr 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

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

ksmbd: fix mechToken leak when SPNEGO decode fails after token alloc

The kernel ASN.1 BER decoder calls action callbacks incrementally as it walks the input. When ksmbd_decode_negTokenInit() reaches the mechToken [2] OCTET STRING element, ksmbd_neg_token_alloc() allocates conn->mechToken immediately via kmemdup_nul(). If a later element in the same blob is malformed, then the decoder will return nonzero after the allocation is already live. This could happen if mechListMIC [3] overrunse the enclosing SEQUENCE.

decode_negotiation_token() then sets conn->use_spnego = false because both the negTokenInit and negTokenTarg grammars failed. The cleanup at the bottom of smb2_sess_setup() is gated on use_spnego:

if (conn->use_spnego && conn->mechToken) { kfree(conn->mechToken); conn->mechToken = NULL; }

so the kfree is skipped, causing the mechToken to never be freed.

This codepath is reachable pre-authentication, so untrusted clients can cause slow memory leaks on a server without even being properly authenticated.

Fix this up by not checking check for use_spnego, as it's not required, so the memory will always be properly freed. At the same time, always free the memory in ksmbd_conn_free() incase some other failure path forgot to free it.

Weakness: CWE-401

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-31610?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2026-31610?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2026-31610 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-31610 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

• CVE-2026-53266 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2013-6282 Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2022-0185 Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2013-2094 Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Exploited High 7.8

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as AZL-83732, BELL-CVE-2026-31610, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-31610, GHSA-g5hw-v48q-45pv, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-12-CVE-2026-31610, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2204-CVE-2026-31610 and 2 more.