Bug 2420379 (CVE-2023-53825)

Summary: CVE-2023-53825 kernel: kcm: Fix error handling for SOCK_DGRAM in kcm_sendmsg()
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: rhel-process-autobot, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A memory leak and queue corruption vulnerability was found in the Kernel Connection Multiplexor (KCM) implementation in the Linux kernel. In kcm_sendmsg() for SOCK_DGRAM sockets, when an error occurs during send, the MSG_MORE queue is not properly purged. This leads to memory leaks and corrupted queue state, as subsequent sendmsg() calls resume from the wrong position in the queue.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-12-09 02:06:59 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

kcm: Fix error handling for SOCK_DGRAM in kcm_sendmsg().

syzkaller found a memory leak in kcm_sendmsg(), and commit c821a88bd720
("kcm: Fix memory leak in error path of kcm_sendmsg()") suppressed it by
updating kcm_tx_msg(head)->last_skb if partial data is copied so that the
following sendmsg() will resume from the skb.

However, we cannot know how many bytes were copied when we get the error.
Thus, we could mess up the MSG_MORE queue.

When kcm_sendmsg() fails for SOCK_DGRAM, we should purge the queue as we
do so for UDP by udp_flush_pending_frames().

Even without this change, when the error occurred, the following sendmsg()
resumed from a wrong skb and the queue was messed up.  However, we have
yet to get such a report, and only syzkaller stumbled on it.  So, this
can be changed safely.

Note this does not change SOCK_SEQPACKET behaviour.