Resource Leak Affecting kernel-core package, versions *

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-core package and not the kernel-core package as distributed by RHEL. See How to fix? for RHEL:9 relevant fixed versions and status.

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

kfence: fix memory leak when cat kfence objects

Hulk robot reported a kmemleak problem:

unreferenced object 0xffff93d1d8cc02e8 (size 248):
  comm "cat", pid 23327, jiffies 4624670141 (age 495992.217s)
  hex dump (first 32 bytes):
    00 40 85 19 d4 93 ff ff 00 10 00 00 00 00 00 00  .@..............
    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
  backtrace:
     seq_open+0x2a/0x80
     full_proxy_open+0x167/0x1e0
     do_dentry_open+0x1e1/0x3a0
     path_openat+0x961/0xa20
     do_filp_open+0xae/0x120
     do_sys_openat2+0x216/0x2f0
     do_sys_open+0x57/0x80
     do_syscall_64+0x33/0x40
     entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
unreferenced object 0xffff93d419854000 (size 4096):
  comm "cat", pid 23327, jiffies 4624670141 (age 495992.217s)
  hex dump (first 32 bytes):
    6b 66 65 6e 63 65 2d 23 32 35 30 3a 20 30 78 30  kfence-#250: 0x0
    30 30 30 30 30 30 30 37 35 34 62 64 61 31 32 2d  0000000754bda12-
  backtrace:
     seq_read_iter+0x313/0x440
     seq_read+0x14b/0x1a0
     full_proxy_read+0x56/0x80
     vfs_read+0xa5/0x1b0
     ksys_read+0xa0/0xf0
     do_syscall_64+0x33/0x40
     entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9

I find that we can easily reproduce this problem with the following commands:

cat /sys/kernel/debug/kfence/objects
echo scan > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

The leaked memory is allocated in the stack below:

do_syscall_64
  do_sys_open
    do_dentry_open
      full_proxy_open
        seq_open            ---> alloc seq_file
  vfs_read
    full_proxy_read
      seq_read
        seq_read_iter
          traverse          ---> alloc seq_buf

And it should have been released in the following process:

do_syscall_64
  syscall_exit_to_user_mode
    exit_to_user_mode_prepare
      task_work_run
        ____fput
          __fput
            full_proxy_release  ---> free here

However, the release function corresponding to file_operations is not implemented in kfence. As a result, a memory leak occurs. Therefore, the solution to this problem is to implement the corresponding release function.

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2021-47089
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0129ab1f268b6cf88825eae819b9b84aa0a85634
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2f06c8293d27f6337f907042c602c9c953988c48