NULL Pointer Dereference Affecting kernel package, versions *


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux security rating

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS
    0.04% (11th percentile)

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-RHEL7-KERNEL-8241845
  • published 22 Oct 2024
  • disclosed 21 Oct 2024

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for RHEL:7 kernel.

NVD Description

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:

mm/filemap: fix filemap_get_folios_contig THP panic

Patch series "memfd-pin huge page fixes".

Fix multiple bugs that occur when using memfd_pin_folios with hugetlb pages and THP. The hugetlb bugs only bite when the page is not yet faulted in when memfd_pin_folios is called. The THP bug bites when the starting offset passed to memfd_pin_folios is not huge page aligned. See the commit messages for details.

This patch (of 5):

memfd_pin_folios on memory backed by THP panics if the requested start offset is not huge page aligned:

BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000036 RIP: 0010:filemap_get_folios_contig+0xdf/0x290 RSP: 0018:ffffc9002092fbe8 EFLAGS: 00010202 RAX: 0000000000000002 RBX: 0000000000000002 RCX: 0000000000000002

The fault occurs here, because xas_load returns a folio with value 2:

filemap_get_folios_contig()
    for (folio = xas_load(&xas); folio && xas.xa_index <= end;
                    folio = xas_next(&xas)) {
            ...
            if (!folio_try_get(folio))   <-- BOOM

"2" is an xarray sibling entry. We get it because memfd_pin_folios does not round the indices passed to filemap_get_folios_contig to huge page boundaries for THP, so we load from the middle of a huge page range see a sibling. (It does round for hugetlbfs, at the is_file_hugepages test).

To fix, if the folio is a sibling, then return the next index as the starting point for the next call to filemap_get_folios_contig.

CVSS Scores

version 3.1
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NVD

5.5 medium
  • Attack Vector (AV)
    Local
  • Attack Complexity (AC)
    Low
  • Privileges Required (PR)
    Low
  • User Interaction (UI)
    None
  • Scope (S)
    Unchanged
  • Confidentiality (C)
    None
  • Integrity (I)
    None
  • Availability (A)
    High
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Red Hat

5.5 medium