CVE-2026-64109

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

af_unix: Fix UAF read of tail->len in unix_stream_data_wait()

unix_stream_data_wait() does skb_peek_tail(&sk->sk_receive_queue) without holding any lock that prevents SKBs on that queue from being dequeued and freed. This has been the case since commit 79f632c71bea ("unix/stream: fix peeking with an offset larger than data in queue"). The first consequence of this is that the pointer comparison tail != last can be false even if last semantically refers to an already-freed SKB while tail is a new SKB allocated at the same address; which can cause unix_stream_data_wait() to wrongly keep blocking after new data has arrived, but only in a weird scenario where a peeking recv() and a normal recv() on the same socket are racing, which is probably not a real problem.

But since commit 2b514574f7e8 ("net: af_unix: implement splice for stream af_unix sockets"), tail is actually dereferenced, which can cause UAF in the following race scenario (where test_setup() runs single-threaded, and afterwards, test_thread1() and test_thread2() run concurrently in two threads:

static int socks[2];
void test_setup(void) {
  socketpair(AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, 0, socks);
  send(socks[1], "A", 1, 0);
  int peekoff = 1;
  setsockopt(socks[0], SOL_SOCKET, SO_PEEK_OFF, &peekoff, sizeof(peekoff));
}
void test_thread1(void) {
  char dummy;
  recv(socks[0], &dummy, 1, MSG_PEEK);
}
void test_thread2(void) {
  char dummy;
  recv(socks[0], &dummy, 1, 0);
  shutdown(socks[1], SHUT_WR);
}

when racing like this:

thread1                       thread2
unix_stream_read_generic
  mutex_lock(&u->iolock)
  skb_peek(&sk->sk_receive_queue)
  skb_peek_next(skb, &sk->sk_receive_queue)
  mutex_unlock(&u->iolock)
                              unix_stream_read_generic
                                unix_state_lock(sk)
                                skb_peek(&sk->sk_receive_queue)...