CVE-2023-52659 Affecting kernel-default-livepatch-devel package, versions <6.4.0-150600.23.7.3


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.05% (18th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-SLES156-KERNELDEFAULTLIVEPATCHDEVEL-7711307
  • published20 Aug 2024
  • disclosed25 Jun 2024

Introduced: 25 Jun 2024

CVE-2023-52659  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade SLES:15.6 kernel-default-livepatch-devel to version 6.4.0-150600.23.7.3 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-default-livepatch-devel package and not the kernel-default-livepatch-devel package as distributed by SLES. See How to fix? for SLES:15.6 relevant fixed versions and status.

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

x86/mm: Ensure input to pfn_to_kaddr() is treated as a 64-bit type

On 64-bit platforms, the pfn_to_kaddr() macro requires that the input value is 64 bits in order to ensure that valid address bits don't get lost when shifting that input by PAGE_SHIFT to calculate the physical address to provide a virtual address for.

One such example is in pvalidate_pages() (used by SEV-SNP guests), where the GFN in the struct used for page-state change requests is a 40-bit bit-field, so attempts to pass this GFN field directly into pfn_to_kaddr() ends up causing guest crashes when dealing with addresses above the 1TB range due to the above.

Fix this issue with SEV-SNP guests, as well as any similar cases that might cause issues in current/future code, by using an inline function, instead of a macro, so that the input is implicitly cast to the expected 64-bit input type prior to performing the shift operation.

While it might be argued that the issue is on the caller side, other archs/macros have taken similar approaches to deal with instances like this, such as ARM explicitly casting the input to phys_addr_t:

e48866647b48 ("ARM: 8396/1: use phys_addr_t in pfn_to_kaddr()")

A C inline function is even better though.

[ mingo: Refined the changelog some more & added __always_inline. ]

CVSS Scores

version 3.1