[CVE-2024-14040][LOW] net: nexthop: Increase weight to u16 In CLOS networks, as link failures occur at various points in the network, ECMP weights of the involved nodes are adjusted to compensate. With high fan-out of the involved nodes, and overall high number of nodes, a (non-)ECMP weight ratio that we would like to configure does not fit into 8 bits. Instead of, say, 255:254, we might like to configure something like 1000:999. For these deployments, the 8-bit weight may not be enough. To that end, in this patch increase the next hop weight from u8 to u16. Increasing the width of an integral type can be tricky, because while the code still compiles, the types may not check out anymore, and numerical errors come up. To prevent this, the conversion was done in two steps. First the type was changed from u8 to a single-member structure, which invalidated all uses of the field. This allowed going through them one by one and audit for type correctness. Then the structure was replaced with a vanilla u16 again. This should ensure that no place was missed. The UAPI for configuring nexthop group members is that an attribute NHA_GROUP carries an array of struct nexthop_grp entries: struct nexthop_grp { __u32 id; /* nexthop id - must exist */ __u8 weight; /* weight of this nexthop */ __u8 resvd1; __u16 resvd2; }; The field resvd1 is currently validated and required to be zero. We can lift this requirement and carry high-order bits of the weight in the reserved field: struct nexthop_grp { __u32 id; /* nexthop id - must exist */ __u8 weight; /* weight of this nexthop */ __u8 weight_high; __u16 resvd2; }; Keeping the fields split this way was chosen in case an existing userspace makes assumptions about the width of the weight field, and to sidestep any endianness issues. The weight field is currently encoded as the weight value minus one, because weight of 0 is invalid. This same trick is impossible for the new weight_high field, because zero must mean actual zero. With this in place: - Old userspace is guaranteed to carry weight_high of 0, therefore configuring 8-bit weights as appropriate. When dumping nexthops with 16-bit weight, it would only show the lower 8 bits. But configuring such nexthops implies existence of userspace aware of the extension in the first place. - New userspace talking to an old kernel will work as long as it only attempts to configure 8-bit weights, where the high-order bits are zero. Old kernel will bounce attempts at configuring >8-bit weights. Renaming reserved fields as they are allocated for some purpose is commonly done in Linux. Whoever touches a reserved field is doing so at their own risk. nexthop_grp::resvd1 in particular is currently used by at least strace, however they carry an own copy of UAPI headers, and the conversion should be trivial. A helper is provided for decoding the weight out of the two fields. Forcing a conversion seems preferable to bending backwards and introducing anonymous unions or whatever. Signed-off-by: Petr Machata <petrm@nvidia.com> Reviewed-by: Ido Schimmel <idosch@nvidia.com> Reviewed-by: David Ahern <dsahern@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Przemek Kitszel <przemyslaw.kitszel@intel.com> Link: https://patch.msgid.link/483e2fcf4beb0d9135d62e7d27b46fa2685479d4.1723036486.git.petrm@nvidia.com Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>

[CVE-2024-14040][LOW] net: nexthop: Increase weight to u16 In CLOS networks, as link failures occur at various points in the network, ECMP weights of the involved nodes are adjusted to compensate. With high fan-out of the involved nodes, and overall high number of nodes, a (non-)ECMP weight ratio that we would like to configure does not fit into 8 bits. Instead of, say, 255:254, we might like to configure something like 1000:999. For these deployments, the 8-bit weight may not be enough. To that end, in this patch increase the next hop weight from u8 to u16. Increasing the width of an integral type can be tricky, because while the code still compiles, the types may not check out anymore, and numerical errors come up. To prevent this, the conversion was done in two steps. First the type was changed from u8 to a single-member structure, which invalidated all uses of the field. This allowed going through them one by one and audit for type correctness. Then the structure was replaced with a vanilla u16 again. This should ensure that no place was missed. The UAPI for configuring nexthop group members is that an attribute NHA_GROUP carries an array of struct nexthop_grp entries: struct nexthop_grp { __u32 id; /* nexthop id - must exist */ __u8 weight; /* weight of this nexthop */ __u8 resvd1; __u16 resvd2; }; The field resvd1 is currently validated and required to be zero. We can lift this requirement and carry high-order bits of the weight in the reserved field: struct nexthop_grp { __u32 id; /* nexthop id - must exist */ __u8 weight; /* weight of this nexthop */ __u8 weight_high; __u16 resvd2; }; Keeping the fields split this way was chosen in case an existing userspace makes assumptions about the width of the weight field, and to sidestep any endianness issues. The weight field is currently encoded as the weight value minus one, because weight of 0 is invalid. This same trick is impossible for the new weight_high field, because zero must mean actual zero. With this in place: - Old userspace is guaranteed to carry weight_high of 0, therefore configuring 8-bit weights as appropriate. When dumping nexthops with 16-bit weight, it would only show the lower 8 bits. But configuring such nexthops implies existence of userspace aware of the extension in the first place. - New userspace talking to an old kernel will work as long as it only attempts to configure 8-bit weights, where the high-order bits are zero. Old kernel will bounce attempts at configuring >8-bit weights. Renaming reserved fields as they are allocated for some purpose is commonly done in Linux. Whoever touches a reserved field is doing so at their own risk. nexthop_grp::resvd1 in particular is currently used by at least strace, however they carry an own copy of UAPI headers, and the conversion should be trivial. A helper is provided for decoding the weight out of the two fields. Forcing a conversion seems preferable to bending backwards and introducing anonymous unions or whatever. Signed-off-by: Petr Machata <petrm@nvidia.com> Reviewed-by: Ido Schimmel <idosch@nvidia.com> Reviewed-by: David Ahern <dsahern@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Przemek Kitszel <przemyslaw.kitszel@intel.com> Link: https://patch.msgid.link/483e2fcf4beb0d9135d62e7d27b46fa2685479d4.1723036486.git.petrm@nvidia.com Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>

[AL-KERNEL]

CVE: CVE-2024-14040
Priority: LOW
AL-KERNEL base severity: LOW
KPANIC flag: NO
Patch: net: nexthop: Increase weight to u16 In CLOS networks, as link failures occur at various points in the network, ECMP weights of the involved nodes are adjusted to compensate. With high fan-out of the involved nodes, and overall high number of nodes, a (non-)ECMP weight ratio that we would like to configure does not fit into 8 bits. Instead of, say, 255:254, we might like to configure something like 1000:999. For these deployments, the 8-bit weight may not be enough. To that end, in this patch increase the next hop weight from u8 to u16. Increasing the width of an integral type can be tricky, because while the code still compiles, the types may not check out anymore, and numerical errors come up. To prevent this, the conversion was done in two steps. First the type was changed from u8 to a single-member structure, which invalidated all uses of the field. This allowed going through them one by one and audit for type correctness. Then the structure was replaced with a vanilla u16 again. This should ensure that no place was missed. The UAPI for configuring nexthop group members is that an attribute NHA_GROUP carries an array of struct nexthop_grp entries: struct nexthop_grp { __u32 id; /* nexthop id - must exist */ __u8 weight; /* weight of this nexthop */ __u8 resvd1; __u16 resvd2; }; The field resvd1 is currently validated and required to be zero. We can lift this requirement and carry high-order bits of the weight in the reserved field: struct nexthop_grp { __u32 id; /* nexthop id - must exist */ __u8 weight; /* weight of this nexthop */ __u8 weight_high; __u16 resvd2; }; Keeping the fields split this way was chosen in case an existing userspace makes assumptions about the width of the weight field, and to sidestep any endianness issues. The weight field is currently encoded as the weight value minus one, because weight of 0 is invalid. This same trick is impossible for the new weight_high field, because zero must mean actual zero. With this in place: - Old userspace is guaranteed to carry weight_high of 0, therefore configuring 8-bit weights as appropriate. When dumping nexthops with 16-bit weight, it would only show the lower 8 bits. But configuring such nexthops implies existence of userspace aware of the extension in the first place. - New userspace talking to an old kernel will work as long as it only attempts to configure 8-bit weights, where the high-order bits are zero. Old kernel will bounce attempts at configuring >8-bit weights. Renaming reserved fields as they are allocated for some purpose is commonly done in Linux. Whoever touches a reserved field is doing so at their own risk. nexthop_grp::resvd1 in particular is currently used by at least strace, however they carry an own copy of UAPI headers, and the conversion should be trivial. A helper is provided for decoding the weight out of the two fields. Forcing a conversion seems preferable to bending backwards and introducing anonymous unions or whatever. Signed-off-by: Petr Machata <petrm@nvidia.com> Reviewed-by: Ido Schimmel <idosch@nvidia.com> Reviewed-by: David Ahern <dsahern@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Przemek Kitszel <przemyslaw.kitszel@intel.com> Link: https://patch.msgid.link/483e2fcf4beb0d9135d62e7d27b46fa2685479d4.1723036486.git.petrm@nvidia.com Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Commit: b72a6a7ab9573e06d5c2fcb92eaa28614a735bfd
Upstream patch: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=b72a6a7ab9573e06d5c2fcb92eaa28614a735bfd
Original CVE announcement: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2024-14040
Analysis date: Sun, 26 Jul 2026 02:53:46 -0400
ActionableScore: 0
ActionableScore lower bound: unknown
Actionable bucket: Ordinary Moderate / Low-like
Manual review required: NO

Summary:
This patch extends nexthop group ECMP weights from 8 bit to 16 bit and updates validation and rebalance arithmetic, with no demonstrated memory corruption, privilege escalation, remote trigger, or kernel crash primitive.

======================================================================
ABOUT THIS REPORT
======================================================================

The original Linux kernel CVE announcement for CVE-2024-14040 is available here:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2024-14040

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-2024-14040	LOW	CHECK WITH IMPACT FROM ORIG NN MODERATE	Maybe valid. Check manually. Hints by AL-KERNEL: The best (paranoid) CVSS is 'AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L';CWE-682;Other CVSS 'AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:N';BEST CVSS score: '2.3';DESCR 'Nexthop group weight handling is being extended from 8 bit to 16 bit for ECMP and non ECMP routing deployments. Based on the provided diff, this is a UAPI and arithmetic width change rather than a memory corruption or privilege escalation issue. Configuration of nexthop groups is a local routing control plane operation. For the CVSS the PR:H because reliable triggering requires administrative routing privileges such as CAP_NET_ADMIN in typical deployments. The issue is not directly network reachable because packet traffic does not create or modify nexthop groups. Impact is at most operational routing policy inconsistency or incorrect load balancing if userspace compatibility assumptions are wrong, with no demonstrated confidentiality or integrity impact and no kernel crash primitive.';NO MANUAL CHECK; ,and ActionableScore result is Ordinary Moderate / Low-like (with actual score 0)	YES	REMOTE  DECREASED_TO_MODERATE_REGULAR_FROM_MODERATE7_BASED_ON_GUESSCVSS DECREASED_TO_LOW_FROM_MODERATE_BASED_ON_ACTIONABLESCORELESSTHAN3	NO	YES	checked

======================================================================
ACTIONABLESCORE ANALYSIS
======================================================================

ActionableScore=0

## 1. ActionableScore

* Conservative score: 0
* Paranoid score: 0
* Final recommended bucket: **Ordinary Moderate / Low-like**::

## 2. Signal breakdown

Positive signals:

* None security-relevant.
* No UAF, double-free, OOB write, type confusion, refcount issue, stale pointer, arbitrary write, info leak, or kernel crash primitive is shown.
* The patch is a UAPI and arithmetic-width extension for nexthop ECMP weights from u8 to u16.

Negative signals:

* Requires admin/root/CAP_NET_ADMIN in typical deployments: -2. Creating or modifying nexthop groups is a routing control-plane operation.
* Not remote reachable. Packet traffic does not create or modify nexthop groups.
* No demonstrated confidentiality, integrity, or availability impact beyond possible administrative misconfiguration or compatibility behavior.

## 3. Reachability analysis

The affected path is reachable through netlink routing configuration for nexthop groups. In normal deployments this requires CAP_NET_ADMIN or equivalent administrative routing privileges. Network namespaces may delegate CAP_NET_ADMIN inside a namespace, but this still represents a privileged routing-control context rather than an unprivileged local trigger. The path is not triggered by normal packet forwarding or remote traffic. The subsystem is common, but the changed behavior is administrative configuration of ECMP weights, not a packet-processing vulnerability.

## 4. Severity interpretation

This behaves like a non-security functional change or at most a very low-risk correctness issue. The patch expands supported nexthop weights and updates related arithmetic to avoid truncation or numerical mistakes. There is no realistic evidence of memory corruption, privilege escalation, information disclosure, or reliable kernel DoS. Theoretical routing-policy inconsistency is not enough to make this actionable as a kernel CVE.

## 5. One-sentence report phrase

This patch extends nexthop group ECMP weights from 8 bit to 16 bit and updates validation and rebalance arithmetic, with no demonstrated memory corruption, privilege escalation, remote trigger, or kernel crash primitive.

## 6. Manual review recommendation

NO MANUAL CHECK NEEDED

This can be auto-closed for security triage unless an external advisory provides a concrete downstream primitive not present in the patch.

======================================================================
UPSTREAM PATCH SUMMARY
======================================================================

Patch: net: nexthop: Increase weight to u16 In CLOS networks, as link failures occur at various points in the network, ECMP weights of the involved nodes are adjusted to compensate. With high fan-out of the involved nodes, and overall high number of nodes, a (non-)ECMP weight ratio that we would like to configure does not fit into 8 bits. Instead of, say, 255:254, we might like to configure something like 1000:999. For these deployments, the 8-bit weight may not be enough. To that end, in this patch increase the next hop weight from u8 to u16. Increasing the width of an integral type can be tricky, because while the code still compiles, the types may not check out anymore, and numerical errors come up. To prevent this, the conversion was done in two steps. First the type was changed from u8 to a single-member structure, which invalidated all uses of the field. This allowed going through them one by one and audit for type correctness. Then the structure was replaced with a vanilla u16 again. This should ensure that no place was missed. The UAPI for configuring nexthop group members is that an attribute NHA_GROUP carries an array of struct nexthop_grp entries: struct nexthop_grp { __u32 id; /* nexthop id - must exist */ __u8 weight; /* weight of this nexthop */ __u8 resvd1; __u16 resvd2; }; The field resvd1 is currently validated and required to be zero. We can lift this requirement and carry high-order bits of the weight in the reserved field: struct nexthop_grp { __u32 id; /* nexthop id - must exist */ __u8 weight; /* weight of this nexthop */ __u8 weight_high; __u16 resvd2; }; Keeping the fields split this way was chosen in case an existing userspace makes assumptions about the width of the weight field, and to sidestep any endianness issues. The weight field is currently encoded as the weight value minus one, because weight of 0 is invalid. This same trick is impossible for the new weight_high field, because zero must mean actual zero. With this in place: - Old userspace is guaranteed to carry weight_high of 0, therefore configuring 8-bit weights as appropriate. When dumping nexthops with 16-bit weight, it would only show the lower 8 bits. But configuring such nexthops implies existence of userspace aware of the extension in the first place. - New userspace talking to an old kernel will work as long as it only attempts to configure 8-bit weights, where the high-order bits are zero. Old kernel will bounce attempts at configuring >8-bit weights. Renaming reserved fields as they are allocated for some purpose is commonly done in Linux. Whoever touches a reserved field is doing so at their own risk. nexthop_grp::resvd1 in particular is currently used by at least strace, however they carry an own copy of UAPI headers, and the conversion should be trivial. A helper is provided for decoding the weight out of the two fields. Forcing a conversion seems preferable to bending backwards and introducing anonymous unions or whatever. Signed-off-by: Petr Machata <petrm@nvidia.com> Reviewed-by: Ido Schimmel <idosch@nvidia.com> Reviewed-by: David Ahern <dsahern@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Przemek Kitszel <przemyslaw.kitszel@intel.com> Link: https://patch.msgid.link/483e2fcf4beb0d9135d62e7d27b46fa2685479d4.1723036486.git.petrm@nvidia.com Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Commit: b72a6a7ab9573e06d5c2fcb92eaa28614a735bfd
Upstream URL: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=b72a6a7ab9573e06d5c2fcb92eaa28614a735bfd

Changed files:
  include/net/nexthop.h
  include/uapi/linux/nexthop.h
  net/ipv4/nexthop.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=b72a6a7ab9573e06d5c2fcb92eaa28614a735bfd

======================================================================
DETAILED REPORT METHODOLOGY
======================================================================

The original Linux kernel CVE announcement for CVE-2024-14040 can be found here:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2024-14040

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:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:N
  The Best / paranoid CVSS vector: AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
  The Best / paranoid CVSS score: 2.3

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: 0

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 alexanjelausa@gmail.com (and both
send reply to CVE record itself too and see "reply" button below for howto reply).