CVE-2026-98586

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) subsystem. This vulnerability can lead to a Denial of Service (DoS) through a kernel crash. A race condition occurs between timer rearming and cleanup operations because the system modifies a timer before properly acquiring a reference to the associated transport object. An attacker able to generate SCTP traffic can trigger this timing window, causing a reference count underflow on an already freed memory object and resulting in system instability.

This vulnerability is evaluated as Moderate severity because successful exploitation relies on winning a race condition during SCTP timer rearming and teardown, resulting in a denial-of-service crash rather than arbitrary code execution or data leakage. Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems do not load the SCTP kernel module by default unless an application explicitly requests an SCTP socket or an administrator loads it. As a result, only environments actively running SCTP services are exposed to network-triggered crashes.

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.