CVE-2026-31610: Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

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

ksmbd: fix mechToken leak when SPNEGO decode fails after token alloc

The kernel ASN.1 BER decoder calls action callbacks incrementally as it walks the input. When ksmbd_decode_negTokenInit() reaches the mechToken [2] OCTET STRING element, ksmbd_neg_token_alloc() allocates conn->mechToken immediately via kmemdup_nul(). If a later element in the same blob is malformed, then the decoder will return nonzero after the allocation is already live. This could happen if mechListMIC [3] overrunse the enclosing SEQUENCE.

decode_negotiation_token() then sets conn->use_spnego = false because both the negTokenInit and negTokenTarg grammars failed. The cleanup at the bottom of smb2_sess_setup() is gated on use_spnego:

if (conn->use_spnego && conn->mechToken) { kfree(conn->mechToken); conn->mechToken = NULL; }

so the kfree is skipped, causing the mechToken to never be freed.

This codepath is reachable pre-authentication, so untrusted clients can cause slow memory leaks on a server without even being properly authenticated.

Fix this up by not checking check for use_spnego, as it's not required, so the memory will always be properly freed. At the same time, always free the memory in ksmbd_conn_free() incase some other failure path forgot to free it.