Executive brief
A vulnerability in the Linux kernel's Bluetooth subsystem could allow a nearby attacker to cause a system crash or memory corruption. By sending a specially crafted Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signal, an attacker can trigger a race condition that corrupts internal communication channel lists. This issue primarily affects the stability and availability of devices using Bluetooth.
Technical details
A race condition exists in the net/bluetooth/l2cap_core.c component of the Linux kernel. The function l2cap_ecred_reconf_rsp() fails to acquire the l2cap_chan_lock() before calling l2cap_chan_del(), leading to a missing synchronization primitive. A remote attacker using a crafted BLE device can send an L2CAP ECRED reconfiguration response to corrupt the channel list while it is being iterated by another thread. This can result in a kernel panic or memory corruption. Patches have been released across multiple stable kernel branches to add the necessary locking and reference counting (l2cap_chan_hold/put).
Affected products
- Linux Linux Kernel 5.7 to 5.10.258, 5.15.209, and other stable branches
Timeline
- 2026-06-24: advisory: CVE-2026-53071 published by NVD
- 2026-04-13: patched: Initial fix committed to mainline kernel
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0ccd75c51f620374086f359e906917676e699a1c
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/330b20ec97916961ee0e6c29c06bc0fa7c96e64c
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/42776497cdbc9a665b384a6dcb85f0d4bd927eab
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5501d055a1ce3c747141e3955ba8cf034d193f3e
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/77a853aec710b2fdf41fa298ea3cbc9a4358f917
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/96dca51715d86559ed6ed8028e5445cecb80f3ae
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/dc89961b76f12aff47124c1df4bdb32a080f4d0c