CVE-2023-53539

An incorrect state restoration flaw was found in the Linux kernel's RDMA rxe (soft-RoCE) driver in the requester packet transmission logic. A local user with access to RDMA devices can trigger this issue when network layer packet drops occur during RDMA send operations, causing the work queue element state to be incompletely saved and restored. This results in data corruption in resent packets, leading to denial of service or potential data integrity issues.

The vulnerability occurs when rxe_requester attempts to retransmit a packet after receiving -EAGAIN from the IP layer. The code saves work queue element state to enable retransmission, but fails to preserve the DMA structure that tracks scatter-gather list processing. Additionally, the state snapshot happens after packet construction has already modified the DMA fields. When heavy network stress causes packet drops—particularly when a fast sender communicates with a slow receiver across multiple queue pairs—the incomplete restoration causes retransmitted packets to carry corrupted payload data.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

To mitigate this issue, prevent the rdma_rxe module from being loaded. See https://access.redhat.com/solutions/41278 for instructions on blacklisting kernel modules.