NULL Pointer Dereference Affecting kernel-macros package, versions <5.14.21-150400.24.158.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.04% (6th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-SLES154-KERNELMACROS-9534638
  • published27 Mar 2025
  • disclosed26 Mar 2025

Introduced: 26 Mar 2025

NewCVE-2022-49568  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-476  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade SLES:15.4 kernel-macros to version 5.14.21-150400.24.158.1 or higher.

NVD Description

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

KVM: Don't null dereference ops->destroy

A KVM device cleanup happens in either of two callbacks:

  1. destroy() which is called when the VM is being destroyed;
  2. release() which is called when a device fd is closed.

Most KVM devices use 1) but Book3s's interrupt controller KVM devices (XICS, XIVE, XIVE-native) use 2) as they need to close and reopen during the machine execution. The error handling in kvm_ioctl_create_device() assumes destroy() is always defined which leads to NULL dereference as discovered by Syzkaller.

This adds a checks for destroy!=NULL and adds a missing release().

This is not changing kvm_destroy_devices() as devices with defined release() should have been removed from the KVM devices list by then.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1