CVEvulnerability
CVE-2022-49546
5.5 MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Status
- Modified
- Published
- 2025-02-26
- Last modified
- 2026-06-17
- Assigner
- 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
- CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
- 5.5 MEDIUM — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-401
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.
Affected configurations
• linux linux kernel (< 5.15.46)
• linux linux kernel (>= 5.16 < 5.17.14)
• linux linux kernel (>= 5.18 < 5.18.3)
Related
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-401 Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime weakness
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/115ee42a4c2f26ba2b4ace2668a3f004621f6833 Patch
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/23cf39dccf7653650701a6f39b119e9116a27f1a git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8765a423a87d74ef24ea02b43b2728fe4039f248 Patch
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b3e34a47f98974d0844444c5121aaff123004e57 Patch
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f675e3a9189d84a9324ab45b0cb19906c2bc8fcb Patch
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/05/msg00030.html lists.debian.org