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Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

CVE-2019-19065

Medium
4.7/10

Summary

A memory leak in the sdma_init() function in drivers/infiniband/hw/hfi1/sdma.c in the Linux kernel before 5.3.9 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) by triggering rhashtable_init() failures, aka CID-34b3be18a04e. NOTE: This has been disputed as not a vulnerability because "rhashtable_init() can only fail if it is passed invalid values in the second parameter's struct, but when invoked from sdma_init() that is a pointer to a static const struct, so an attacker could only trigger failure if they could corrupt kernel memory (in which case a small memory leak is not a significant problem).

  • HIGH
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-401 - Missing release of memory after effective lifetime (memory leak)

'Missing release of memory after effective lifetime (memory leak)' is a weakness that occurs when software doesn't effectively release allocated memory after it is used. If not addressed, this enables attackers to launch denial of service attacks (by crashing or hanging the program) or take advantage of other unexpected behavior resulting from low memory conditions.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published