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Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

CVE-2021-47453

Medium
5.5/10

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ice: Avoid crash from unnecessary IDA free In the remove path, there is an attempt to free the aux_idx IDA whether it was allocated or not. This can potentially cause a crash when unloading the driver on systems that do not initialize support for RDMA. But, this free cannot be gated by the status bit for RDMA, since it is allocated if the driver detects support for RDMA at probe time, but the driver can enter into a state where RDMA is not supported after the IDA has been allocated at probe time and this would lead to a memory leak. Initialize aux_idx to an invalid value and check for a valid value when unloading to determine if an IDA free is necessary.

  • LOW
  • 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