CVE-2020-36312

An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel before 5.8.10. virt/kvm/kvm_main.c has a kvm_io_bus_unregister_dev memory leak upon a kmalloc failure, aka CID-f65886606c2d.

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

• https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/ChangeLog-5.8.10
• https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=f65886606c2d3b562716de030706dfe1bea4ed5e