CVE-2026-98318
7.8 HIGHPublished 2026-10-06 · Updated 2026-10-07
AI risk analysis
- Summary
- The Linux kernel's SMB client fails to properly validate absolute symlink targets before applying NT path fixes, leading to buffer overflows and integer underflows when processing symlinks without a symlinkroot setting. This vulnerability can result in arbitrary code execution or data corruption.
- Exploitability
- Exploitation requires a user with write access to a mounted SMB share who can create or modify symlinks, making it moderately difficult but possible to trigger with default settings.
- Blast radius
- The vulnerability affects any Linux system mounting SMB shares with default settings, potentially allowing attackers to execute arbitrary code or corrupt data across the entire system.
- Detection
- No reliable host or network indicator is derivable from the published description.
- Prioritized remediation
- Upgrade to Linux kernel version 6.10 or later which contains the fix for this SMB client vulnerability.
Analysis generated locally by garnet-coder (no data left the box). AI-assisted — verify against primary sources before acting.
NVD description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: smb: client: validate absolute native symlink targets before NT fixups With symlinkroot unset, an absolute target is copied without conversion to an NT drive path. Later code still assumes an NT prefix is present when modifying the target and calculating the print name length. For "/ab", this causes two failures: sym[5] and path[5] are written past their allocations, and plen -= 2 * poff subtracts an assumed 8-byte prefix from a 6-byte UTF-16 target, wrapping u16 plen to 65534. That underflow causes another overflow: memcpy() copies 65534 bytes into a 24-byte buffer. A user with write access to a mounted share can trigger these bugs with default settings. Validate the NT drive prefix, including an ASCII drive letter, before accessing fixed offsets or subtracting the prefix length.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
All references
Source data: NVD (nvd.nist.gov), public domain. Exploit-DB.ai adds local AI analysis for defensive use only.
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