In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net/sched: sch_cake: drop...

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

net/sched: sch_cake: drop WARN_ON(1) for malformed packets in ACK filter

The sch_cake ACK filter parses packets to find the TCP header and filter duplicated ACKs if the flow is backlogged. The parsing code contains a WARN_ON(1) which can be triggered by a malformed IP header in certain cases. Depending on the system configuration, this leads either to either spamming dmesg with warnings, or a panic if panic_on_warn is set.

The code already correctly skips the offending packet in the branch that triggers the warning, so the WARN_ON itself doesn't really serve any purpose. So just drop it altogether to avoid the inconvenient side effects.