CVE-2026-97484

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's USB/IP (USB over Internet Protocol) Virtual Host Controller Interface (VHCI) driver. A local user can cause a Denial of Service (DoS) by reading device status information through sysfs when a host controller fails to initialize. Because the driver does not properly validate the controller data pointer before dereferencing it, this action triggers a NULL pointer dereference that crashes the system.

A low impact NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in the Linux kernel's USB/IP Virtual Host Controller Interface (VHCI) driver. If a VHCI host controller's probe fails (for example, due to USB bus number exhaustion), platform_get_drvdata() can return NULL; the status_show_vhci() sysfs handler does not validate this value before converting it, so a local user reading the VHCI status sysfs attribute can trigger a NULL pointer dereference that crashes the kernel, resulting in a local denial of service. Red Hat assesses the impact of this flaw as LOW even though the CVSS:3.1 score is 5.5 (Moderate), because triggering the crash requires an abnormal system state (a previously failed VHCI host controller probe) and the flaw affects only system availability, with no impact on confidentiality or integrity. The affected Red Hat products are the Linux kernel as shipped in RHEL 9 and RHEL 10 (including the kernel-rt variant), Red Hat In-Vehicle OS 2, and OpenShift Container Platform releases built on RHEL CoreOS 9; the kernels in RHEL 6, 7, and 8 (kernel and kernel-rt) and OpenShift releases built on RHEL CoreOS 8 are not affected because the vulnerable code is not present. Fixes for the affected products are currently deferred; the residual risk is limited to a local denial of service that requires local shell access and an already-failed VHCI host controller probe to trigger.

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.