CVE-2026-98646

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's TCP subsystem. A local user running Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) programs can cause a Denial of Service (DoS) by crashing the system. This issue occurs when destroying a listening TCP socket with pending connection requests, mistakenly invoking a sleeping operation while holding a non-sleepable lock.

This vulnerability is rated as Moderate impact because exploiting it requires local execution with administrative privileges to load specialized BPF programs that interact with socket iterators. While an authorized privileged process could trigger a kernel panic by terminating active listening sockets that have pending connections, the requirement for high privileges limits exposure to untrusted users on default Red Hat Enterprise Linux installations. Unprivileged users cannot reach the affected mechanism under default security configurations.

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.