In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: dsa: fix netdev_priv() dereference before check on non-DSA netdevice events After the blamed commit, we started doing this dereference for every NETDEV_CHANGEUPPER and NETDEV_PRECHANGEUPPER event in the system. static inline struct dsa_port *dsa_user_to_port(const struct net_device *dev) { struct dsa_user_priv *p = netdev_priv(dev); return p->dp; } Which is obviously bogus, because not all net_devices have a netdev_priv() of type struct dsa_user_priv. But struct dsa_user_priv is fairly small, and p->dp means dereferencing 8 bytes starting with offset 16. Most drivers allocate that much private memory anyway, making our access not fault, and we discard the bogus data quickly afterwards, so this wasn't caught. B