Incomplete Cleanup Affecting kernel-default package, versions <5.14.21-150400.24.141.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.04% (6th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-SLES154-KERNELDEFAULT-8449789
  • published3 Dec 2024
  • disclosed2 Dec 2024

Introduced: 2 Dec 2024

NewCVE-2024-47674  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-459  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade SLES:15.4 kernel-default to version 5.14.21-150400.24.141.1 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-default package and not the kernel-default package as distributed by SLES. See How to fix? for SLES:15.4 relevant fixed versions and status.

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

mm: avoid leaving partial pfn mappings around in error case

As Jann points out, PFN mappings are special, because unlike normal memory mappings, there is no lifetime information associated with the mapping - it is just a raw mapping of PFNs with no reference counting of a 'struct page'.

That's all very much intentional, but it does mean that it's easy to mess up the cleanup in case of errors. Yes, a failed mmap() will always eventually clean up any partial mappings, but without any explicit lifetime in the page table mapping itself, it's very easy to do the error handling in the wrong order.

In particular, it's easy to mistakenly free the physical backing store before the page tables are actually cleaned up and (temporarily) have stale dangling PTE entries.

To make this situation less error-prone, just make sure that any partial pfn mapping is torn down early, before any other error handling.

CVSS Scores

version 3.1