CVE-2019-19065

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 parameters 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).

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
• For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
• When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
• To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

References

• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-12/msg00029.html
• https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/ChangeLog-5.3.9
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/34b3be18a04ecdc610aae4c48e5d1b799d8689f6
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20191205-0001/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4208-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4210-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4226-1/