CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-4135

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Jul 14, 2022 | Modified: Jul 20, 2022
CVSS 3.x
5.5
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

A memory leak vulnerability was found in the Linux kernels eBPF for the Simulated networking device driver in the way user uses BPF for the device such that function nsim_map_alloc_elem being called. A local user could use this flaw to get unauthorized access to some data.

Weakness

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

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Linux_kernel Linux * 5.16 (excluding)
Linux_kernel Linux 5.16 (including) 5.16 (including)
Linux_kernel Linux 5.16-rc1 (including) 5.16-rc1 (including)
Linux_kernel Linux 5.16-rc2 (including) 5.16-rc2 (including)
Linux_kernel Linux 5.16-rc3 (including) 5.16-rc3 (including)
Linux_kernel Linux 5.16-rc4 (including) 5.16-rc4 (including)
Linux_kernel Linux 5.16-rc5 (including) 5.16-rc5 (including)

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