Linux Kernel Daily: SMB Stack Gets a Security Overhaul
Two merge commits landed fixes across both sides of the SMB protocol stack — the Linux client and the ksmbd server — closing data corruption bugs and multiple heap overflow and information disclosure vulnerabilities. Anyone running file shares over SMB should treat this as a priority update.
Duration: PT2M8S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Linux Kernel Daily.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Linux Kernel Daily
- Published: 2026-09-02T06:01:17Z
- Audio duration: PT2M8S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good morning. It's September 2nd, 2026, and today's briefing is a single, focused story: SMB file sharing just got a serious round of hardening on both the client and server sides of the Linux kernel.
The top pattern here is data integrity and security converging in the same pull cycle. On the client side, commit 8-9-a-3-1-2-9 pulls in fixes from Paulo Alcantara addressing fallocate operations — insert, collapse, zero, and punch hole. The insert range code was copying overlapping data in the wrong direction,…
Security is the second thread. The same client pull fixes two heap overflow bugs in legacy SMB1 code — one in extended attribute writes, one in POSIX ACL handling — both reachable by an unprivileged user through set extended attribute calls. That's a real local privilege concern, not just a stability issue.
On the server side, commit 9-a-5-8-d-a pulls in ksmbd fixes from Namjae Jeon with the same two themes. Data exposure: pipe compound padding and response buffers weren't being cleared, and several file system information structures had uninitialized fields being sent back to clients. And robustness: DACL parsing…
What to remember: if you're maintaining SMB client or server…
That…
Nearby episodes from Linux Kernel Daily
- Race Condition Cleanup Across Cgroups, Workqueues, and EDAC
- Weekly Recap - Late Fixes Sweep Ahead of the 7.3 Merge Window Close
- The Great Merge-Window Cleanup
- SCSI Layer Hardens Against Unsafe Locking
- Merge Window Hardening Wave
- Packet Scheduler Denial-of-Service Fixes
- The Late Merge Window Cleanup Wave
- The Merge Window Closes on Race Conditions and Resource Leaks