CVE-2026-72341

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's net/mlx5e component. A local attacker could exploit a race condition during the publication of channel statistics. On weakly-ordered architectures, this could lead to a null pointer dereference, causing a system crash and a denial of service.

A moderate vulnerability was found in the Linux kernel mlx5e (Mellanox ethernet) driver. In the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, 9, and 10 kernels and the Red Hat In-Vehicle OS kernel components, mlx5e_channel_stats_alloc() publishes a new per-channel statistics entry in priv->channel_stats[] and then increments the stats_nch counter without any memory barriers. On weakly-ordered architectures such as ARM, PowerPC, and RISC-V, a concurrent reader can observe the incremented counter before the associated channel_stats pointer becomes visible and dereference a NULL pointer while collecting network statistics, resulting in a kernel panic and denial of service. This was observed in production on BlueField-3 DPU (arm64) systems where ovs-vswitchd queried netdev statistics over netlink while NIC channels were being opened on another CPU; a local attacker able to trigger statistics queries concurrent with channel allocation could crash the system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and the RHEL 8.4 and 8.6 update streams are not affected because the vulnerable code is not present in those kernels. Fixes for the affected streams are deferred; the residual risk is a local denial of service only, with no impact on confidentiality or integrity.

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 do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base, or stability.