Medium [CVE-2026-15813] memory corruption and out-of-bounds access via malformed network packet defragmentation

A vulnerability was found in the network packet de-fragmentation engine of kronosnet (Version affected <= 1.34). The internal reassembly code does not properly validate sequence numbers of incoming payload fragments.

An attacker can exploit this lack of verification by transmitting malformed packets with corrupted sequence parameters. Under specific conditions, this forces the packet processing layer to parse data outside the designated bounds of the internal memory structures, causing an out-of-bounds memory access or heap corruption.

This behavior can result in sudden application crashes or system instability. Red Hat Product Security rates this vulnerability's impact as Low.

While memory corruption and out-of-bounds access conditions are technically severe flaw types (typically rated Moderate or Important), the deployment requirements drastically reduce the real-world threat vector.

The flaw can only be reached if kronosnet is running completely unencrypted traffic (a setting unsupported for production) and the attacker is capable of spoofing a trusted IP address already authorized within the cluster infrastructure to pass initial Access Control Lists (ACLs).

Affected products named by the advisory: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9; Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4; and 1 more.