Bug 2348358 (CVE-2022-49546) - CVE-2022-49546 kernel: x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer
Summary: CVE-2022-49546 kernel: x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2022-49546
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security DevOps Team
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2025-02-26 03:26 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2025-03-16 14:16 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-02-26 03:26:39 UTC
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.

Comment 1 Avinash Hanwate 2025-02-26 06:36:10 UTC
Upstream advisory:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2025022615-CVE-2022-49546-8673@gregkh/T


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