Microsoft advisory for CVE-2026-31429 — azl3 kernel 6.6.130.1-3 on Azure Linux 3.0
🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)
📋 Microsoft's advisory
EchelonGraph does not copy Microsoft's advisory page: its FAQ and remediation text are not shown here. Read the advisory on https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-31429. This page also shows what EchelonGraph holds for CVE-2026-31429, with the description from its CVE record, which the CVE Numbering Authority that assigned the CVE wrote: for a CVE Microsoft assigned, often in the words of Microsoft's own advisory.
🎯 Affected products1
- azl3 kernel 6.6.130.1-3 on Azure Linux 3.0
🧭 EchelonGraph on CVE-2026-31429
- EchelonGraph score
- 5.5 MEDIUM
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Fix status
- A fix is available — apply it.
Description from the CVE record (CVE.org), as published by its numbering authority
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: skb: fix cross-cache free of KFENCE-allocated skb head SKB_SMALL_HEAD_CACHE_SIZE is intentionally set to a non-power-of-2 value (e.g. 704 on x86_64) to avoid collisions with generic kmalloc bucket sizes. This ensures that skb_kfree_head() can reliably use skb_end_offset to distinguish skb heads allocated from skb_small_head_cache vs. generic kmalloc caches. However, when KFENCE is enabled, kfence_ksize() returns the exact requested allocation size instead of the slab bucket size. If a caller (e.g. bpf_test_init) allocates skb head data via kzalloc() and the requested size happens to equal SKB_SMALL_HEAD_CACHE_SIZE, then slab_build_skb() -> ksize() returns that exact value. After subtracting skb_shared_info overhead, skb_end_offset ends up matching SKB_SMALL_HEAD_HEADROOM, causing skb_kfree_head() to incorrectly free the object to skb_small_head_cache instead of back to the original kmalloc cache, resulting in a slab cross-cache free: kmem_cache_free(skbuff_small_head): Wrong slab cache. Expected skbuff_small_head but got kmalloc-1k Fix this by always calling kfree(head) in skb_kfree_head(). This keeps the free path generic and avoids allocator-specific misclassification for KFENCE objects.
Published by kernel.org, the CVE Numbering Authority that assigned CVE-2026-31429, in its CVE record at CVE.org; reused under the CVE Program's Terms of Use (its licence and MITRE's copyright notice are in our Terms of Service).