NULL Pointer Dereference Affecting kernel-rt package, versions *


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux security rating.

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-RHEL9-KERNELRT-8686799
  • published4 Feb 2025
  • disclosed31 Jan 2025

Introduced: 31 Jan 2025

NewCVE-2025-21670  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-476  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for RHEL:9 kernel-rt.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-rt package and not the kernel-rt 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:

vsock/bpf: return early if transport is not assigned

Some of the core functions can only be called if the transport has been assigned.

As Michal reported, a socket might have the transport at NULL, for example after a failed connect(), causing the following trace:

BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 00000000000000a0
#PF: supervisor read access in kernel mode
#PF: error_code(0x0000) - not-present page
PGD 12faf8067 P4D 12faf8067 PUD 113670067 PMD 0
Oops: Oops: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP NOPTI
CPU: 15 UID: 0 PID: 1198 Comm: a.out Not tainted 6.13.0-rc2+
RIP: 0010:vsock_connectible_has_data+0x1f/0x40
Call Trace:
 vsock_bpf_recvmsg+0xca/0x5e0
 sock_recvmsg+0xb9/0xc0
 __sys_recvfrom+0xb3/0x130
 __x64_sys_recvfrom+0x20/0x30
 do_syscall_64+0x93/0x180
 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x76/0x7e

So we need to check the vsk->transport in vsock_bpf_recvmsg(), especially for connected sockets (stream/seqpacket) as we already do in __vsock_connectible_recvmsg().

CVSS Scores

version 3.1