KernelScan.io

HIGH

ipmi BMC Loop

CVE-2026-46177

CVSS 7.5 / 10.0 NVD

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

KernelScan AI6.2MEDIUM

01

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ipmi: Add limits to event and receive message requests The driver would just fetch events and receive messages until the BMC said it was done. To avoid issues with BMCs that never say they are done, add a limit of 10 fetches at a time. In addition, an si interface has an attn state it can return from the hardware which is supposed to cause a flag fetch to see if the driver needs to fetch events or message or a few other things. If the attn bit gets stuck, it's a similar problem. So allow messages in between flag fetches so the driver itself doesn't get stuck. This is a more general fix than the previous fix for the specific bad BMC, but should fix the more general issue of a BMC that won't stop saying it has data. This has been there from the beginning of the driver. It's not a bug per-se, but it is accounting for bugs in BMCs.

02

Engine v0.2.0

Risk summary

Systems with IPMI BMCs that have firmware bugs may experience CPU resource exhaustion and system unresponsiveness. The IPMI driver would loop indefinitely fetching events and messages when a BMC incorrectly reports continuous data availability. This primarily affects bare-metal servers in datacenter environments.

Affecteddrivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_si_intf.c (ipmi)

Vulnerability analysis

The IPMI driver lacked bounds checking when fetching events and messages from BMCs, trusting the BMC to eventually clear status flags. Buggy BMC firmware that never clears EVENT_MSG_BUFFER_FULL or RECEIVE_MSG_AVAIL flags would cause infinite loops consuming CPU resources. The fix adds a limit of 10 consecutive fetches and logic to process normal messages between flag operations, preventing complete driver wedging. This is a local hardware-initiated DoS requiring physical IPMI hardware.

03

BranchFixed inPatch commit
5.105.10.258112df8e63163
5.155.15.209304b56883b7e
6.16.1.1759059dc94421e
6.126.12.88e20212b431be
6.186.18.303d37d2165df9
6.66.6.14067c44e0deba9
7.07.0.7c024167fb004
mainline7.1-rc3c4cca2369686