CVE-2026-45913 net: bridge: mcast: always update mdb_n_entries for vlan contexts

What is CVE-2026-45913?

CVE-2026-45913 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 27 May 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:

net: bridge: mcast: always update mdb_n_entries for vlan contexts

syzbot triggered a warning[1] about the number of mdb entries in a context. It turned out that there are multiple ways to trigger that warning today (some got added during the years), the root cause of the problem is that the increase is done conditionally, and over the years these different conditions increased so there were new ways to trigger the warning, that is to do a decrease which wasn't paired with a previous increase.

For example one way to trigger it is with flush: $ ip l add br0 up type bridge vlan_filtering 1 mcast_snooping 1 $ ip l add dumdum up master br0 type dummy $ bridge mdb add dev br0 port dumdum grp 239.0.0.1 permanent vid 1 $ ip link set dev br0 down $ ip link set dev br0 type bridge mcast_vlan_snooping 1 ^^^^ this will enable snooping, but will not update mdb_n_entries because in __br_multicast_enable_port_ctx() we check !netif_running $ bridge mdb flush dev br0 ^^^ this will trigger the warning because it will delete the pg which we added above, which will try to decrease mdb_n_entries

Fix the problem by removing the conditional increase and always keep the count up-to-date while the vlan exists. In order to do that we have to first initialize it on port-vlan context creation, and then always increase or decrease the value regardless of mcast options. To keep the current behaviour we have to enforce the mdb limit only if the context is port's or if the port-vlan's mcast snooping is enabled.

[1] ------------[ cut here ]------------ n == 0 WARNING: net/bridge/br_multicast.c:718 at br_multicast_port_ngroups_dec_one net/bridge/br_multicast.c:718 [inline], CPU#0: syz.4.4607/22043 WARNING: net/bridge/br_multicast.c:718 at br_multicast_port_ngroups_dec net/bridge/br_multicast.c:771 [inline], CPU#0: syz.4.4607/22043 WARNING: net/bridge/br_multicast.c:718 at br_multicast_del_pg+0x1bbe/0x1e20 net/bridge/br_multicast.c:825, CPU#0: syz.4.4607/22043 Modules linked in: CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 22043 Comm: syz.4.4607 Not tainted syzkaller #0 PREEMPT(full) Hardware name: Google Google Compute Engine/Google Compute Engine, BIOS Google 01/24/2026 RIP: 0010:br_multicast_port_ngroups_dec_one net/bridge/br_multicast.c:718 [inline] RIP: 0010:br_multicast_port_ngroups_dec net/bridge/br_multicast.c:771 [inline] RIP: 0010:br_multicast_del_pg+0x1bbe/0x1e20 net/bridge/br_multicast.c:825 Code: 41 5f 5d e9 04 7a 48 f7 e8 3f 73 5c f7 90 0f 0b 90 e9 cf fd ff ff e8 31 73 5c f7 90 0f 0b 90 e9 16 fd ff ff e8 23 73 5c f7 90 <0f> 0b 90 e9 60 fd ff ff e8 15 73 5c f7 eb 05 e8 0e 73 5c f7 48 8b RSP: 0018:ffffc9000c207220 EFLAGS: 00010293 RAX: ffffffff8a68042d RBX: ffff88807c6f1800 RCX: ffff888066e90000 RDX: 0000000000000000 RSI: 0000000000000000 RDI: 0000000000000000 RBP: 0000000000000000 R08: ffff888066e90000 R09: 000000000000000c R10: 000000000000000c R11: 0000000000000000 R12: ffff8880303ef800 R13: dffffc0000000000 R14: ffff888050eb11c4 R15: 1ffff1100a1d6238 FS: 00007fa45921b6c0(0000) GS:ffff8881256f5000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000 CS: 0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033 CR2: 00007fa4591f9ff8 CR3: 0000000081df2000 CR4: 00000000003526f0 Call Trace: <TASK> br_mdb_flush_pgs net/bridge/br_mdb.c:1525 [inline] br_mdb_flush net/bridge/br_mdb.c:1544 [inline] br_mdb_del_bulk+0x5e2/0xb20 net/bridge/br_mdb.c:1561 rtnl_mdb_del+0x48a/0x640 net/core/rtnetlink.c:-1 rtnetlink_rcv_msg+0x77e/0xbe0 net/core/rtnetlink.c:6967 netlink_rcv_skb+0x232/0x4b0 net/netlink/af_netlink.c:2550 netlink_unicast_kernel net/netlink/af_netlink.c:1318 [inline] netlink_unicast+0x80f/0x9b0 net/netlink/af_netlink.c:1344 netlink_sendmsg+0x813/0xb40 net/netlink/af_netlink.c:1894 sock_sendmsg_nosec net/socket.c:727 [inline] __sock_sendmsg net/socket.c:742 [inline] ____sys_sendmsg+0xa68/0xad0 net/socket.c:2592 ___sys_sendmsg+0x2a5/0x360 net/socke ---truncated---

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-45913?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2026-45913?

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-2026-45913 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-45913 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 BELL-CVE-2026-45913, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-45913, GHSA-wpm7-9hcr-ppjf, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2404-CVE-2026-45913, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-45913.