CVE-2022-49828

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

hugetlbfs: dont delete error page from pagecache

This change is very similar to the change that was made for shmem [1], and it solves the same problem but for HugeTLBFS instead.

Currently, when poison is found in a HugeTLB page, the page is removed from the page cache. That means that attempting to map or read that hugepage in the future will result in a new hugepage being allocated instead of notifying the user that the page was poisoned. As [1] states, this is effectively memory corruption.

The fix is to leave the page in the page cache. If the user attempts to use a poisoned HugeTLB page with a syscall, the syscall will fail with EIO, the same error code that shmem uses. For attempts to map the page, the thread will get a BUS_MCEERR_AR SIGBUS.

[1]: commit a76054266661 (mm: shmem: dont truncate page if memory failure happens)

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/30571f28bb35c826219971c63bcf60d2517112ed
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8625147cafaa9ba74713d682f5185eb62cb2aedb
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ec667443b2dbc6cdbbac4073e51a17733158ec6a