CVE-2026-98556

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's Google Virtual NIC (gve) driver. A local user with raw packet access or an adjacent guest system can trigger a Denial of Service (DoS) by sending network packets with an excessively large segment size. The driver fails to validate the Maximum Segment Size (MSS) before writing it to a hardware descriptor during TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO), causing the size value to wrap or truncate to zero. This misconfiguration can cause network packet processing failures and disrupt network connectivity.

This vulnerability is rated as having Moderate impact for Red Hat Enterprise Linux because exploitation requires local access with raw socket privileges or a tap-attached virtual guest, limiting the attack scope strictly to denial of service on network transmission. The issue is limited to cloud environments utilizing the Google Virtual NIC (gve) device driver configured with DQO queues, meaning bare-metal deployments and systems running on other hypervisors are completely unaffected. Furthermore, confidential system data and system integrity remain uncompromised since the defect only results in packet handling errors and lost network communication.

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.