In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bonding: refuse to enslave CAN devices syzbot reported a kernel paging request crash in can_rx_unregister() inside net/can/af_can.c

Overview

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

bonding: refuse to enslave CAN devices

syzbot reported a kernel paging request crash in can_rx_unregister() inside net/can/af_can.c. The crash occurs because a virtual CAN device (vxcan) is being enslaved to a bonding master.

During the enslavement process, the bonding driver mutates and modifies the network device states to fit an Ethernet-like aggregation model. However, CAN devices operate on a completely different Layer 2 architecture, relying on the CAN mid-layer private data structure (can_ml_priv) instead of standard Ethernet structures. Since bonding does not initialize or maintain these CAN structures, subsequent operations on the half-enslaved interface (such as closing associated sockets via isotp_release) lead to a null-pointer dereference when accessing the CAN receiver lists.

Bonding CAN interfaces is architecturally invalid as CAN lacks MAC addresses, ARP capabilities, and standard Ethernet link-layer mechanisms. While generic loopback devices are blocked globally in net/core/dev.c, virtual CAN devices bypass this check because they do not carry the IFF_LOOPBACK flag, despite acting as local software-loopbacks.

Fix this by explicitly blocking network devices of type ARPHRD_CAN from being enslaved at the very beginning of bond_enslave(). This prevents illegal state mutations, eliminates the resulting KASAN crashes, and avoids potential memory leaks from incomplete socket cleanups.

As the CAN support has been added a long time after bonding the Fixes-tag points to the introduction of ARPHRD_CAN that would have needed a specific handling in bonding_main.c.

Affected

• linux_kernel >= 2.6.25, < 5.15.210
• linux_kernel >= 5.16, < 6.1.176
• linux_kernel >= 6.2, < 6.6.143
• linux_kernel >= 6.7, < 6.12.93
• linux_kernel >= 6.13, < 6.18.35
• linux_kernel >= 6.19, < 7.0.12
• linux_kernel = 7.1

Remediation

Upgrade past the affected range:

• linux_kernel 7.0.12