Impact
A NULL pointer dereference was found in the ICE driver that occurs when the offline loopback test for a network interface is executed via ethtool. The driver fails to initialize the receive ring for a test virtual interface, causing an oops that brings the kernel down. The result is a denial‑of‑service condition; an attacker who can run ethtool on the system can force a reboot or interrupt services.
Affected Systems
The flaw exists in Linux kernels that contain the ICE driver before the patch was applied. Kernel releases up to and including 6.19.0‑rc7, released in March 2026, are affected, as are any custom builds that have not incorporated the fix. Distributions that ship a patched kernel in their current releases are no longer vulnerable.
Risk and Exploitability
The CVSS score of 5.5 indicates moderate severity. EPSS shows less than 1 % chance of exploitation in the wild, and the vulnerability is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog. Exploitation requires local or privileged access to invoke ethtool, so the attack vector is inferred to be local. The compromise results in a kernel crash affecting availability only; there is no support for remote code execution or privilege escalation.
OpenCVE Enrichment