Use After Free Affecting kernel-tools package, versions *

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-tools package and not the kernel-tools package as distributed by RHEL. See How to fix? for RHEL:8 relevant fixed versions and status.

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

tracing/timerlat: Only clear timer if a kthread exists

The timerlat tracer can use user space threads to check for osnoise and timer latency. If the program using this is killed via a SIGTERM, the threads are shutdown one at a time and another tracing instance can start up resetting the threads before they are fully closed. That causes the hrtimer assigned to the kthread to be shutdown and freed twice when the dying thread finally closes the file descriptors, causing a use-after-free bug.

Only cancel the hrtimer if the associated thread is still around. Also add the interface_lock around the resetting of the tlat_var->kthread.

Note, this is just a quick fix that can be backported to stable. A real fix is to have a better synchronization between the shutdown of old threads and the starting of new ones.

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2024-46845
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8a9d0d405159e9c796ddf771f7cff691c1a2bc1e
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8c72f0b2c45f21cb8b00fc37f79f632d7e46c2ed
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e6a53481da292d970d1edf0d8831121d1c5e2f0d