Guest triggered use-after-free in Linux xen-netback A malicious or buggy network PV frontend can force Linux netback to disable the interface and terminate the receive kernel thread associated with queue 0 in response to the frontend sending a malformed packet. Such kernel thread termination will lead to a use-after-free in Linux netback when the backend is destroyed, as the kernel thread associated with queue 0 will have already exited and thus the call to kthread_stop will be performed against a stale pointer.