Memory Leak Affecting kernel package, versions *

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel package and not the kernel package as distributed by RHEL. See How to fix? for RHEL:7 relevant fixed versions and status.

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

ubifs: ubifs_symlink: Fix memleak of inode->i_link in error path

For error handling path in ubifs_symlink(), inode will be marked as bad first, then iput() is invoked. If inode->i_link is initialized by fscrypt_encrypt_symlink() in encryption scenario, inode->i_link won't be freed by callchain ubifs_free_inode -> fscrypt_free_inode in error handling path, because make_bad_inode() has changed 'inode->i_mode' as 'S_IFREG'. Following kmemleak is easy to be reproduced by injecting error in ubifs_jnl_update() when doing symlink in encryption scenario: unreferenced object 0xffff888103da3d98 (size 8): comm "ln", pid 1692, jiffies 4294914701 (age 12.045s) backtrace: kmemdup+0x32/0x70 __fscrypt_encrypt_symlink+0xed/0x1c0 ubifs_symlink+0x210/0x300 [ubifs] vfs_symlink+0x216/0x360 do_symlinkat+0x11a/0x190 do_syscall_64+0x3b/0xe0 There are two ways fixing it:

1. Remove make_bad_inode() in error handling path. We can do that because ubifs_evict_inode() will do same processes for good symlink inode and bad symlink inode, for inode->i_nlink checking is before is_bad_inode().
2. Free inode->i_link before marking inode bad. Method 2 is picked, it has less influence, personally, I think.

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2024-26972
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3faea7810e2b3e9a9a92ef42d7e5feaeb8ff7133
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/62b5ae00c2b835639002ce898ccb5d82c51073ae
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6379b44cdcd67f5f5d986b73953e99700591edfa