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Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

CVE-2021-47523

Medium
5.5/10

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: IB/hfi1: Fix leak of rcvhdrtail_dummy_kvaddr This buffer is currently allocated in hfi1_init(): if (reinit) ret = init_after_reset(dd); else ret = loadtime_init(dd); if (ret) goto done; /* allocate dummy tail memory for all receive contexts */ dd->rcvhdrtail_dummy_kvaddr = dma_alloc_coherent(&dd->pcidev->dev, sizeof(u64), &dd->rcvhdrtail_dummy_dma, GFP_KERNEL); if (!dd->rcvhdrtail_dummy_kvaddr) { dd_dev_err(dd, "cannot allocate dummy tail memory\n"); ret = -ENOMEM; goto done; } The reinit triggered path will overwrite the old allocation and leak it. Fix by moving the allocation to hfi1_alloc_devdata() and the deallocation to hfi1_free_devdata().

  • 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