* [CVE-2026-93242][LOW] scsi: qla2xxx: Fix response queue over-consumption in __qla_consume_iocb()
@ 2026-09-24 17:24 21% AL-KERNEL
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From: AL-KERNEL @ 2026-09-24 17:24 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: kernel-cve
CVE: CVE-2026-93242
Priority: LOW
AL-KERNEL base severity: LOW
KPANIC flag: NO
Patch: scsi: qla2xxx: Fix response queue over-consumption in __qla_consume_iocb()
Commit: a136c311676fd1010b1bde3bcfd410caa2fa040f
Upstream patch: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=a136c311676fd1010b1bde3bcfd410caa2fa040f
Original CVE announcement: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2026-93242
Analysis date: Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:24:09 -0400
ActionableScore: 2
ActionableScore lower bound: unknown
Actionable bucket: Ordinary Moderate
Manual review required: NO
Summary:
No one-sentence report phrase was found.
======================================================================
ABOUT THIS REPORT
======================================================================
The original Linux kernel CVE announcement for CVE-2026-93242 is available here:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2026-93242
The original announcement does not normally provide a security severity
estimate, CVSS assessment, or enough information to determine whether the
reported kernel bug represents a practically relevant security issue.
This report was generated by AL-KERNEL, an AI-assisted Linux kernel
vulnerability analysis system developed by Alexander Larkin. It combines
an autonomous classifier with LLM-assisted technical analysis and a
separate ActionableScore mechanism.
The purpose of this report is to prioritize Linux kernel CVEs before
manual review, identify cases that require prompt investigation, and
support automatic closure of issues that are unlikely to have meaningful
security impact.
Published priority for this report: LOW
Manual review required: NO
A detailed explanation of the methodology and priority rules is included
at the end of this message.
======================================================================
AL-KERNEL CLASSIFICATION RESULT
======================================================================
CVE-2026-93242 LOW https://www.kernelcve.org/list/?q=CVE-2026-93242 CHECK WITH IMPACT FROM ORIG NN LOW Maybe valid. Check manually. Hints by AL-KERNEL: The best (paranoid) CVSS is 'AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H';CWE-193;CWE-670;Other CVSS 'AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L';BEST CVSS score: '5.3';DESCR 'A qla2xxx response queue handling error can consume one IOCB more than specified because the head IOCB is already skipped before __qla_consume_iocb processes the entry_count field. The extra consumption marks the next unrelated firmware response as processed and silently drops it, which can desynchronize response processing and cause I O failures or storage path availability issues. For the CVSS the PR:N rating is used because a potential attacker would not need privileges on the target host after obtaining access to the attached Fibre Channel fabric or a controlled peer device. The attack is adjacent network reachable through a Fibre Channel SAN rather than directly reachable from an IP network. Exploitation requires hardware specific conditions and the affected EDIF auth ELS response path. Impact is primarily denial of service or degraded storage availability. No concrete memory corruption, information disclosure, integrity modification, or privilege escalation primitive is demonstrated by the patch.';YES REQUIRES MANUAL CHECK; ,and ActionableScore result is Ordinary Moderate (with actual score 2) YES INIT SIMPLEFIX HARDWARE LINUS NO NO checked
======================================================================
ACTIONABLESCORE ANALYSIS
======================================================================
ActionableScore=2
PrimitiveClass=CLASS_C
RealUAF=NO
HostAdminRequired=UNKNOWN
NamespaceScopedPrivilege=UNKNOWN
ImportantCandidate=NO
ManualReview=RECOMMENDED
AutoDowngradeAllowed=YES
1. ActionableScore
* Raw conservative score: 2
* Conservative score: 2
* Raw paranoid score: 2
* Paranoid score: 2
* Final recommended bucket: **Ordinary Moderate**::
2. Signal breakdown
* +1 Firmware-mediated external influence. The affected response IOCB is generated by the QLogic HBA firmware while processing Fibre Channel traffic, including the EDIF auth ELS related path introduced by the fixed commit.
* +1 Availability impact realistic. The off by one queue consumption marks an unrelated IOCB as RESPONSE_PROCESSED and silently drops a legitimate firmware response. This can cause failed or stalled storage I O operations, session recovery, or loss of a storage path.
Important non-awarded signals:
* +0 Direct remote reachability. The patch does not establish a direct IP-network trigger. A potential attacker needs access to the attached Fibre Channel fabric and must cause firmware processing that reaches the affected PUREX response path.
* +0 Strong DoS or host crash. The supplied evidence establishes dropped responses and possible storage disruption, not a kernel panic, host crash, or persistent host-wide failure.
* +0 Memory corruption. The ring pointer advances incorrectly within the response queue, but the patch does not show an out of bounds access, UAF, stale object dereference, arbitrary write, or attacker-controlled overwrite.
* +0 Confidentiality and integrity impact. No information disclosure, unauthorized modification, ownership violation, or privilege escalation primitive is demonstrated.
* +0 Strong exploitation leverage. The next IOCB is skipped and marked processed, but no attacker control over the unrelated IOCB contents, queue address, target selection, or subsequent sensitive kernel operation is established.
* No privilege penalty was applied. The evidence does not positively establish that host-admin-equivalent privilege is required, but it also does not establish the complete trigger for an unprivileged or namespace-scoped attacker.
3. Reachability analysis
The affected code is in the qla2xxx Fibre Channel HBA response path. The immediate input is firmware-generated response queue data, not a directly exposed userspace API or an ordinary IP network packet path.
A possible attacker model is an actor with access to the same Fibre Channel SAN or a controlled Fibre Channel peer that can participate in the relevant EDIF auth ELS exchange. That model is firmware-mediated and adjacent to the target storage fabric. It is not equivalent to Internet-reachable network access.
The supplied patch does not show whether an unauthenticated or untrusted Fibre Channel peer can reliably create the required PUREX IOCB sequence, whether EDIF is enabled, or whether the affected response processing can be reached without prior SAN zoning, authentication, provisioning, or storage-administrator setup. Therefore HostAdminRequired and NamespaceScopedPrivilege remain UNKNOWN.
No race is established. The defect is deterministic once a multi-entry response is processed by this code path.
4. Primitive and severity interpretation
The exact primitive is a logical response-ring accounting error. qla24xx_process_response_queue advances ring_ptr beyond the head IOCB before __qla_consume_iocb runs. The old code then consumes purex entry_count entries starting at the first continuation IOCB even though entry_count includes the already skipped head IOCB.
This causes one unrelated subsequent IOCB to be marked RESPONSE_PROCESSED and skipped. The demonstrated consequence is loss of a legitimate firmware response and possible I O disruption or storage-path recovery failure.
This is not an active-object lifetime violation. No object is freed, no stale reference is dereferenced, no second release or refcount mutation occurs, and no controlled memory corruption is demonstrated. The issue is therefore CLASS_C, an invalid-state and availability problem rather than CLASS_A or CLASS_B kernel corruption.
ImportantCandidate is NO because the supplied patch provides no evidence of controlled queue manipulation, arbitrary memory access, security-boundary bypass, disclosure, integrity impact, or privilege escalation. AutoDowngradeAllowed is YES because the established primitive is constrained to response handling and lacks unresolved memory-corruption leverage. Manual review is still recommended to determine whether an untrusted Fibre Channel peer can reliably trigger the required firmware response sequence in a deployed SAN topology.
5. One-sentence report phrase
A qla2xxx off by one response queue consumption bug can discard an unrelated firmware IOCB and cause storage I O failures through a Fibre Channel firmware-mediated path, but the patch does not establish memory corruption or privilege escalation.
6. Manual review recommendation
MANUAL CHECK RECOMMENDED
Confirm whether an untrusted or compromised Fibre Channel peer can reach the EDIF auth ELS PUREX response path and whether dropped IOCBs can reliably cause session loss, repeated reset, or sustained storage unavailability.
7. Call-site confidence
Call-site confidence: medium
======================================================================
UPSTREAM PATCH SUMMARY
======================================================================
Patch: scsi: qla2xxx: Fix response queue over-consumption in __qla_consume_iocb()
Commit: a136c311676fd1010b1bde3bcfd410caa2fa040f
Upstream URL: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=a136c311676fd1010b1bde3bcfd410caa2fa040f
Commit description:
qla24xx_process_response_queue() advances ring_ptr past the head IOCB
before dispatching, so by the time __qla_consume_iocb() runs, ring_ptr
already points at the first continuation IOCB. The function however
looped purex->entry_count times starting at ring_ptr. As entry_count
includes the head, this consumed one entry too many: it stamped
RESPONSE_PROCESSED on the next, unrelated IOCB and advanced the ring
past it, silently dropping a legitimate firmware response. The head
IOCB's signature was also never marked.
Mark the head processed and account for it, then consume only the
entry_count - 1 continuation IOCBs, matching __qla_copy_purex_to_buffer().
Fixes: fac2807 ("scsi: qla2xxx: edif: Add extraction of auth_els from the wire")
Cc: [email protected]
Reported-by: Sashiko <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Nilesh Javali <[email protected]>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Martin K. Petersen (Oracle) <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>
Changed files:
drivers/scsi/qla2xxx/qla_isr.c
Diff excerpt:
Not included in this email. See the upstream URL for the full patch.
Full patch:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=a136c311676fd1010b1bde3bcfd410caa2fa040f
======================================================================
DETAILED REPORT METHODOLOGY
======================================================================
The original Linux kernel CVE announcement for CVE-2026-93242 can be found here:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2026-93242
The original CVE announcement normally does not include a security-level
estimate. In particular, it may not contain a CVSS assessment, an impact
level, or enough information to determine whether the reported bug is a
practically relevant security issue. One purpose of this parallel CVE list
is to provide that missing technical and prioritization information.
The original goal of the AL-KERNEL project was to prioritize Linux kernel
CVE analysis automatically before manual review. The system can also help
identify non-security issues that may be suitable for automatic closure.
This report was generated by AL-KERNEL, an AI-assisted Linux kernel
vulnerability analysis system developed by Alexander Larkin.
The first analysis stage combines an autonomous classifier with additional
LLM-based analysis. The autonomous classifier runs locally on a CPU and is
based on a backpropagation neural network. Together, these mechanisms
produce a technical vulnerability description, identify likely weakness
types, estimate CVSS severity, and provide input for ActionableScore.
Two CVSS estimates are retained because incomplete kernel vulnerability
information often permits more than one defensible interpretation:
Conservative CVSS vector: AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
The Best / paranoid CVSS vector: AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
The Best / paranoid CVSS score: 5.3
The conservative vector represents a lower-impact interpretation.
The Best/paranoid vector intentionally represents a plausible upper-bound
interpretation and should not automatically be treated as demonstrated
real-world impact.
CVSS may also need to be adjusted for a particular Linux deployment,
because actual reachability, privileges, enabled kernel configuration,
hardware, namespaces, exposed device nodes, and other environmental
conditions can differ significantly between systems.
A separate ActionableScore mechanism evaluates practical remediation
urgency. Its analysis may include reachability, attack prerequisites,
subsystem exposure, memory-corruption characteristics, denial-of-service
reliability, and possible confidentiality, integrity, or
privilege-escalation impact.
Conservative ActionableScore: unknown
Paranoid ActionableScore: 2
The final base severity is taken directly from the second tab-separated
field of the AL-KERNEL classification result. ActionableScore does not
replace or independently override that final AL-KERNEL decision, and
if ActionableScore adjusted impact level of ALKERNEL, then you would see
self-readable flags above like INCREASED_TO_HIGH_BASED_ON_ACTIONABLESCOREHIGHEREQTHAN7.
For an AL-KERNEL result of MODERATE, this report uses the following
additional presentation split:
ActionableScore below 5 -> MODERATE REGULAR
ActionableScore 5 or more -> MODERATE 7.0
The distinction between MODERATE REGULAR and MODERATE 7.0 makes it
possible to identify Moderate issues that should receive manual analysis
and fixes before lower-priority MODERATE REGULAR issues. In many cases,
MODERATE REGULAR fixes may wait for a later rebase or routine update.
There is one override in which MODERATE REGULAR becomes MODERATE 7.0
even when the ActionableScore is below 5. When the AL-KERNEL result
contains the KPANIC flag, a MODERATE result is always presented as
MODERATE 7.0. The KPANIC flag selected with few regexps without
usage of AI at all, so it helps to detect cases when Kernel Crash happens
and similar (to filter False-Negative results from the LLM usage).
KPANIC indicates that a reliable kernel crash, kernel panic, or similarly
serious kernel availability impact was identified by the classification
workflow.
AL-KERNEL base severity for this report: LOW
KPANIC detected for this report: NO
Published priority for this report (same as in Subject): LOW
These results are intended to support engineering triage. They are
machine-generated estimates, and cases marked for manual review should
be validated by a human security engineer before final disposition.
For more info read docs linked from here: https://kernelcve.org/
(and you can submit you own patch there to generate such a report
for non-existant CVE-id yet).
Note that in many cases this AI tool selects higher severity, than
real is (means you can expect Importants instead of Moderate 7.0 or
Moderates 7.0 instead of regular Moderates). If you see such cases,
please use reply email interface to add additional manual analyses
info to this particular CVE.
And please, please, let me know when you see Lows instead of Importants
or Important instead of Low (because particular for such cases I
need to tune this AI tool to make it better for this one and next similar).
My contact email for such notifications is [email protected] (and both
send reply to CVE record itself too and see "reply" button below for howto reply).
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