CVE-2026-72046

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's gve driver. When the header-split and Hardware-assisted Generic Receive Offload (HW-GRO) features are active, the driver incorrectly indexes network packet header buffers. This can lead to the driver reading headers belonging to different packets or overwriting header buffers still in use by the device. The primary impact is data corruption, which can cause a significant reduction in network throughput and increased TCP retransmissions, potentially resulting in a denial of service.

This vulnerability is rated with a Moderate impact for Red Hat products because triggering the issue requires specific virtualized network hardware operating with concurrent hardware receive offload features, confining the consequence to throughput degradation and packet corruption rather than arbitrary code execution. The defect is confined to environments utilizing the Google Virtual Ethernet (gve) driver, and releases earlier than Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 do not include the affected code. Furthermore, exploiting the race condition requires multiple interleaved network flows to cause buffer queue desynchronization on the receive datapath.

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.

Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options don't meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.