Bug 2420374 (CVE-2022-50675)

Summary: CVE-2022-50675 kernel: arm64: mte: Avoid setting PG_mte_tagged if no tags cleared or restored
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
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Version: unspecifiedKeywords: Security
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OS: Linux   
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A vulnerability was found in the ARM64 Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) implementation in the Linux kernel. The PG_mte_tagged bit was being incorrectly set on pages that should not have MTE tags, causing conflicts with KASAN hardware tag checking. When pages are migrated, incorrect tags could be copied, leading to KASAN reporting invalid memory access due to tag mismatches between pointer and memory tags.
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-12-09 02:06:38 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

arm64: mte: Avoid setting PG_mte_tagged if no tags cleared or restored

Prior to commit 69e3b846d8a7 ("arm64: mte: Sync tags for pages where PTE
is untagged"), mte_sync_tags() was only called for pte_tagged() entries
(those mapped with PROT_MTE). Therefore mte_sync_tags() could safely use
test_and_set_bit(PG_mte_tagged, &page->flags) without inadvertently
setting PG_mte_tagged on an untagged page.

The above commit was required as guests may enable MTE without any
control at the stage 2 mapping, nor a PROT_MTE mapping in the VMM.
However, the side-effect was that any page with a PTE that looked like
swap (or migration) was getting PG_mte_tagged set automatically. A
subsequent page copy (e.g. migration) copied the tags to the destination
page even if the tags were owned by KASAN.

This issue was masked by the page_kasan_tag_reset() call introduced in
commit e5b8d9218951 ("arm64: mte: reset the page tag in page->flags").
When this commit was reverted (20794545c146), KASAN started reporting
access faults because the overriding tags in a page did not match the
original page->flags (with CONFIG_KASAN_HW_TAGS=y):

  BUG: KASAN: invalid-access in copy_page+0x10/0xd0 arch/arm64/lib/copy_page.S:26
  Read at addr f5ff000017f2e000 by task syz-executor.1/2218
  Pointer tag: [f5], memory tag: [f2]

Move the PG_mte_tagged bit setting from mte_sync_tags() to the actual
place where tags are cleared (mte_sync_page_tags()) or restored
(mte_restore_tags()).