NULL Pointer Dereference Affecting kernel-tools-libs-devel package, versions <0:5.14.0-162.6.1.el9_1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.02% (4th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-RHEL9-KERNELTOOLSLIBSDEVEL-9566904
  • published29 Mar 2025
  • disclosed26 Feb 2025

Introduced: 26 Feb 2025

CVE-2022-49152  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-476  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade RHEL:9 kernel-tools-libs-devel to version 0:5.14.0-162.6.1.el9_1 or higher.
This issue was patched in RHSA-2022:8267.

NVD Description

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

XArray: Fix xas_create_range() when multi-order entry present

If there is already an entry present that is of order >= XA_CHUNK_SHIFT when we call xas_create_range(), xas_create_range() will misinterpret that entry as a node and dereference xa_node->parent, generally leading to a crash that looks something like this:

general protection fault, probably for non-canonical address 0xdffffc0000000001: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP KASAN KASAN: null-ptr-deref in range [0x0000000000000008-0x000000000000000f] CPU: 0 PID: 32 Comm: khugepaged Not tainted 5.17.0-rc8-syzkaller-00003-g56e337f2cf13 #0 RIP: 0010:xa_parent_locked include/linux/xarray.h:1207 [inline] RIP: 0010:xas_create_range+0x2d9/0x6e0 lib/xarray.c:725

It's deterministically reproducable once you know what the problem is, but producing it in a live kernel requires khugepaged to hit a race. While the problem has been present since xas_create_range() was introduced, I'm not aware of a way to hit it before the page cache was converted to use multi-index entries.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1