CVEvulnerability
CVE-2023-53698
7.8 HIGH
Official page ↗
- Status
- Deferred
- Published
- 2025-10-22
- Last modified
- 2026-10-28
- Assigner
- 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
- CVSS 3.1 (416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67)
- 7.8 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
xsk: fix refcount underflow in error path
Fix a refcount underflow problem reported by syzbot that can happen
when a system is running out of memory. If xp_alloc_tx_descs() fails,
and it can only fail due to not having enough memory, then the error
path is triggered. In this error path, the refcount of the pool is
decremented as it has incremented before. However, the reference to
the pool in the socket was not nulled. This means that when the socket
is closed later, the socket teardown logic will think that there is a
pool attached to the socket and try to decrease the refcount again,
leading to a refcount underflow.
I chose this fix as it involved adding just a single line. Another
option would have been to move xp_get_pool() and the assignment of
xs->pool to after the if-statement and using xs_umem->pool instead of
xs->pool in the whole if-statement resulting in somewhat simpler code,
but this would have led to much more churn in the code base perhaps
making it harder to backport.
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/15b453cf7348973217558235b9ece2ee5fea6777 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3e7722c31d4167eb7f3ffd35aba52cab69b79072 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/789fcd94c9cac133dd4d96e193188661aca9f6c3 git.kernel.org
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/85c2c79a07302fe68a1ad5cc449458cc559e314d git.kernel.org