CVE-2026-90083net/sched: act_ife: Only operate on Ethernet frames

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net/sched: act_ife: Only operate on Ethernet frames act_ife encapsulates/decapsulates the original Ethernet header and uses skb->dev->hard_header_len as the length of that header. That is only correct for Ethernet devices: on a device where hard_header_len does not match the L2 header that was actually pulled (PPP reports PPP_HDRLEN while nothing is stripped on ingress), the ingress skb_push()/skb_pull() use the wrong length and can hit skb_under_panic when headroom is tight. IFE is Ethernet-only by design - it builds an outer ethhdr, rewrites h_source/h_dest/h_proto, and calls eth_type_trans() on decode - so instead of trying to make the offsets work for arbitrary link types, simply drop packets that do not carry an Ethernet header. Checking skb->dev->type alone is not enough. We have to cater for a corner case where mirred can redirect an skb from a non-Ethernet device to an Ethernet one, and skb->dev then says nothing about the framing the skb actually has: an skb redirected from ppp0 reaches the target's ingress hook with mac_len 0 and no Ethernet header at all. So at ingress also require mac_len to be ETH_HLEN. On egress mac_len is not maintained, so the device type is all we have; a bogus redirect there yields a malformed frame rather than an out-of-bounds push, and it would be malformed with or without IFE. That corner case is not theoretical - redirecting from ppp0 into a veth that has an ife encode action on its ingress hook panics without this patch: skbuff: skb_under_panic: len:98 put:14 head:ffff88800e410000 data:ffff88800e40fff5 tail:0x57 end:0x640 dev:veth3 kernel BUG at net/core/skbuff.c:214! Call Trace: skb_push (net/core/skbuff.c:224 net/core/skbuff.c:2657) tcf_ife_act (net/sched/act_ife.c:829 net/sched/act_ife.c:874) tc_run (net/core/dev.c:4463) netif_receive_skb (net/core/dev.c:6463 net/core/dev.c:6522) tcf_mirred_to_dev (net/sched/act_mirred.c:248 net/sched/act_mirred.c:328) tcf_mirred_act (net/sched/act_mirred.c:489) tc_run (net/core/dev.c:4463) process_backlog (net/core/dev.c:6728) With Ethernet framing guaranteed, use ETH_HLEN instead of hard_header_len.

CVSS

Not yet scored

Weakness (CWE)

Not given

Known exploited

Not in CISA's KEV catalog

EPSS (exploitation in the next 30 days)

Not loaded for this CVE

Assigned by

Linux

NVD analysis

Received

Record last updated

Sep 17, 2026

First seen by InfoSec Signals

Oct 9, 2026

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