CVE-2022-49546

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer

This is reported by kmemleak detector:

unreferenced object 0xffffc900002a9000 (size 4096): comm kexec, pid 14950, jiffies 4295110793 (age 373.951s) hex dump (first 32 bytes): 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 .ELF………… 04 00 3e 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ..>…………. backtrace: [<0000000016a8ef9f>] __vmalloc_node_range+0x101/0x170 [<000000002b66b6c0>] __vmalloc_node+0xb4/0x160 [<00000000ad40107d>] crash_prepare_elf64_headers+0x8e/0xcd0 [<0000000019afff23>] crash_load_segments+0x260/0x470 [<0000000019ebe95c>] bzImage64_load+0x814/0xad0 [<0000000093e16b05>] arch_kexec_kernel_image_load+0x1be/0x2a0 [<000000009ef2fc88>] kimage_file_alloc_init+0x2ec/0x5a0 [<0000000038f5a97a>] __do_sys_kexec_file_load+0x28d/0x530 [<0000000087c19992>] do_syscall_64+0x3b/0x90 [<0000000066e063a4>] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xae

In crash_prepare_elf64_headers(), a buffer is allocated via vmalloc() to store elf headers. While its not freed back to system correctly when kdump kernel is reloaded or unloaded. Then memory leak is caused. Fix it by introducing x86 specific function arch_kimage_file_post_load_cleanup(), and freeing the buffer there.

And also remove the incorrect elf header buffer freeing code. Before calling arch specific kexec_file loading function, the image instance has been initialized. So image->elf_headers must be NULL. It doesnt make sense to free the elf header buffer in the place.

Three different people have reported three bugs about the memory leak on x86_64 inside Redhat.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.

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://git.kernel.org/stable/c/115ee42a4c2f26ba2b4ace2668a3f004621f6833
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/23cf39dccf7653650701a6f39b119e9116a27f1a
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8765a423a87d74ef24ea02b43b2728fe4039f248
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b3e34a47f98974d0844444c5121aaff123004e57
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f675e3a9189d84a9324ab45b0cb19906c2bc8fcb
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/05/msg00030.html