CVE-2026-98625

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's netfilter subsystem. A timing conflict, or race condition, in the flowtable offload component allows flow data to be prematurely released from memory while still being processed by a cleanup worker. A local attacker could exploit this use-after-free vulnerability during network connection teardown to cause a Denial of Service (DoS) through a system crash or potentially escalate privileges.

Red Hat rates this vulnerability as Moderate severity because exploitation requires local system access and depends on a precise race condition during flow cleanup on systems utilizing hardware flowtable offload, limiting the attack window. In typical Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments, hardware-accelerated flowtable offload is not enabled by default and requires administrative configuration on supported network interfaces. Although an unprivileged local user initiating connection teardown might trigger the condition when this feature is active, successful exploitation primarily results in a denial of service via kernel crash.

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.