Medium [CVE-2026-53394] avoid leaking pre-allocated openowner on unconfirmed retry race
This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-53394 affecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.
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Summary
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: nfsd: avoid leaking pre-allocated openowner on unconfirmed retry race When find_or_alloc_open_stateowner() encounters an unconfirmed owner, it calls release_openowner() and sets oo = NULL.
Control then falls through past the `if (oo)` guard -- which would have freed any pre-allocated `new` -- and unconditionally executes `new = alloc_stateowner(...)`. If `new` was already allocated on a prior iteration, the pointer is silently overwritten and the previous allocation (slab object + owner name buffer) is leaked.
This requires a race: two NFSv4.0 OPEN threads with the same owner string, where a concurrent thread inserts a new unconfirmed owner into the hash between retry iterations. The window is narrow but repeatable under adversarial conditions.
Fix by adding `goto retry` after `oo = NULL` so the already-allocated `new` is reused on the next iteration rather than overwritten. A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's Network File System (NFS) version 4.0 (NFSv4.0) OPEN implementation.
This can lead to a memory leak where pre-allocated memory for an openowner is not properly released, potentially causing a Denial of Service (DoS) over time due to resource exhaustion. Red Hat severity: Low — CVSS 5.5 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).
Weakness: CWE-772.
Affected versions
No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative. Check it before change work.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 8 days ago·verify at source
Fixed versions
No fixed release is recorded yet. That does not prove no patch exists. Confirm against the vendor advisory.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 8 days ago·verify at source
Mitigation
The source record does not include mitigation steps. That does not mean no fix exists. Read the vendor advisory below for the authoritative guidance.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 8 days ago·verify at source
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