CVE-2022-49546

x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer

State
Published
Severity
Not scored
Published
Feb 26, 2025
Updated
May 11, 2026
Reserved
Feb 26, 2025

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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

x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer

This is reported by kmemleak detector:

unreferenced object 0xffffc900002a9000 (size 4096): comm "kexec", pid 14950, jiffies 4295110793 (age 373.951s) hex dump (first 32 bytes): 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 .ELF............ 04 00 3e 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ..>............. backtrace: [<0000000016a8ef9f>] __vmalloc_node_range+0x101/0x170 [<000000002b66b6c0>] __vmalloc_node+0xb4/0x160 [<00000000ad40107d>] crash_prepare_elf64_headers+0x8e/0xcd0 [<0000000019afff23>] crash_load_segments+0x260/0x470 [<0000000019ebe95c>] bzImage64_load+0x814/0xad0 [<0000000093e16b05>] arch_kexec_kernel_image_load+0x1be/0x2a0 [<000000009ef2fc88>] kimage_file_alloc_init+0x2ec/0x5a0 [<0000000038f5a97a>] __do_sys_kexec_file_load+0x28d/0x530 [<0000000087c19992>] do_syscall_64+0x3b/0x90 [<0000000066e063a4>] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xae

In crash_prepare_elf64_headers(), a buffer is allocated via vmalloc() to store elf headers. While it's not freed back to system correctly when kdump kernel is reloaded or unloaded. Then memory leak is caused. Fix it by introducing x86 specific function arch_kimage_file_post_load_cleanup(), and freeing the buffer there.

And also remove the incorrect elf header buffer freeing code. Before calling arch specific kexec_file loading function, the image instance has been initialized. So 'image->elf_headers' must be NULL. It doesn't make sense to free the elf header buffer in the place.

Three different people have reported three bugs about the memory leak on x86_64 inside Redhat.

Scores

The record has no CVSS score.

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • dd5f726076cc7639d9713b334c8c133f77c6757a to before 23cf39dccf7653650701a6f39b119e9116a27f1aAffected
  • dd5f726076cc7639d9713b334c8c133f77c6757a to before 8765a423a87d74ef24ea02b43b2728fe4039f248Affected
  • dd5f726076cc7639d9713b334c8c133f77c6757a to before 115ee42a4c2f26ba2b4ace2668a3f004621f6833Affected
  • dd5f726076cc7639d9713b334c8c133f77c6757a to before f675e3a9189d84a9324ab45b0cb19906c2bc8fcbAffected
  • dd5f726076cc7639d9713b334c8c133f77c6757a to before b3e34a47f98974d0844444c5121aaff123004e57Affected
LinuxLinux
  • 3.17Affected
  • before 3.17Not affected
  • 5.10.236 through 5.10.*Not affected
  • 5.15.46 through 5.15.*Not affected
  • 5.17.14 through 5.17.*Not affected
  • 5.18.3 through 5.18.*Not affected
  • 5.19 and laterNot affected

References

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