Linux Kernel Vulnerability in BPF Implementation Affecting Hardware Driver Responses

CVE-2026-98860

What is CVE-2026-98860?

A vulnerability exists in the Linux kernel's BPF implementation which affects how hardware driver responses are managed. When a transport driver encounters a hardware error and returns a negative error code, the resulting value can be incorrectly interpreted. This occurs due to the implicit promotion of a negative error code to a positive size_t when compared to expected buffer sizes, leading to erroneous evaluations. Consequently, this oversight may cause a hardware error to be interpreted as a successful operation, resulting in uninitialized or stale data being handled by BPF programs. A fix has been implemented by adjusting the data type to correctly interpret negative error codes.

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