Security Resilience

CVE-2026-43197

Memory Safety in Linux Kernel 6.6 – 6.18.16

Published
06 May 2026
Modified
16 October 2026
Patch / advisory
CVSS Score v3.1 9.1
Click a component to see what it means
Raw vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0048 40th percentile
Risk Priority 68 floored blend · peak EPSS

CVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.

Summary

CVE-2026-43197 is a critical-severity Out-of-bounds Read (CWE-125) vulnerability in Linux Linux Kernel. Its CVSS base score is 9.1 (Critical).

Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Data Obfuscation (T1001); ranked at the 40th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to SA-11 (Developer Testing and Evaluation) and SA-8 (Security and Privacy Engineering Principles) — see the control section below for these in your framework.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability Data

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: netconsole: avoid OOB reads, msg is not nul-terminated msg passed to netconsole from the console subsystem is not guaranteed to be nul-terminated. Before recent commit 7eab73b18630 ("netconsole: convert to NBCON…

more

console infrastructure") the message would be placed in printk_shared_pbufs, a static global buffer, so KASAN had harder time catching OOB accesses. Now we see: printk: console [netcon_ext0] enabled BUG: KASAN: slab-out-of-bounds in string+0x1f7/0x240 Read of size 1 at addr ffff88813b6d4c00 by task pr/netcon_ext0/594 CPU: 65 UID: 0 PID: 594 Comm: pr/netcon_ext0 Not tainted 6.19.0-11754-g4246fd6547c9 Call Trace: kasan_report+0xe4/0x120 string+0x1f7/0x240 vsnprintf+0x655/0xba0 scnprintf+0xba/0x120 netconsole_write+0x3fe/0xa10 nbcon_emit_next_record+0x46e/0x860 nbcon_kthread_func+0x623/0x750 Allocated by task 1: nbcon_alloc+0x1ea/0x450 register_console+0x26b/0xe10 init_netconsole+0xbb0/0xda0 The buggy address belongs to the object at ffff88813b6d4000 which belongs to the cache kmalloc-4k of size 4096 The buggy address is located 0 bytes to the right of allocated 3072-byte region [ffff88813b6d4000, ffff88813b6d4c00)

CWE(s)

Related Threats

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques

T1001 Data Obfuscation Command And Control
Adversaries may obfuscate command and control traffic to make it more difficult to detect.
T1001.002 Steganography Command And Control
Adversaries may use steganographic techniques to hide command and control traffic to make detection efforts more difficult.
T1003.002 Security Account Manager Credential Access
Adversaries may attempt to extract credential material from the Security Account Manager (SAM) database either through in-memory techniques or through the Windows Registry where the SAM database is stored.
T1003.003 NTDS Credential Access
Adversaries may attempt to access or create a copy of the Active Directory domain database in order to steal credential information, as well as obtain other information about domain members such as devices, users, and access rights.
T1003.004 LSA Secrets Credential Access
Adversaries with SYSTEM access to a host may attempt to access Local Security Authority (LSA) secrets, which can contain a variety of different credential materials, such as credentials for service accounts.
T1003.006 DCSync Credential Access
Adversaries may attempt to access credentials and other sensitive information by abusing a Windows Domain Controller's application programming interface (API)(Citation: Microsoft DRSR Dec 2017) (Citation: Microsoft GetNCCChanges) (Citati…
Derived from this CVE’s CWE(s) via the direct CWE→ATT&CK cross-walk.

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Affected Assets

linux
linux kernel
7.0 · 6.6 — 6.18.16 · 6.19 — 6.19.6

Mitigating Controls

Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI

Developer testing and evaluation directly finds out-of-bounds read flaws through static analysis, fuzzing, and dynamic bounds checks.

Secure engineering principles require bounds checking and memory-safe constructs that stop out-of-bounds reads from being introduced.

Process isolation confines the effects of an out-of-bounds read to the compromised process.

Input validation rejects malformed indices or lengths that would otherwise cause reads outside buffer bounds.

Mitigating Controls (NIST CSF 2.0) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→CSF cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

ID.RA-01 partial match
blocks

Vulnerability scanning and recording can discover instances of out-of-bounds reads after code is deployed.

PR.PS-02 partial match
blocks

Routine patching replaces vulnerable code containing out-of-bounds read flaws.

PR.PS-06 partial match
blocks

Secure-development practices such as bounds checking and memory-safe languages directly prevent out-of-bounds reads.

Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

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References