CVE-2022-49878

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

bpf, verifier: Fix memory leak in array reallocation for stack state

If an error (NULL) is returned by krealloc(), callers of realloc_array() were setting their allocation pointers to NULL, but on error krealloc() does not touch the original allocation. This would result in a memory resource leak. Instead, free the old allocation on the error handling path.

The memory leak information is as follows as also reported by Zhengchao:

unreferenced object 0xffff888019801800 (size 256): comm bpf_repo, pid 6490, jiffies 4294959200 (age 17.170s) hex dump (first 32 bytes): 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ……………. 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ……………. backtrace: [<00000000b211474b>] __kmalloc_node_track_caller+0x45/0xc0 [<0000000086712a0b>] krealloc+0x83/0xd0 [<00000000139aab02>] realloc_array+0x82/0xe2 [<00000000b1ca41d1>] grow_stack_state+0xfb/0x186 [<00000000cd6f36d2>] check_mem_access.cold+0x141/0x1341 [<0000000081780455>] do_check_common+0x5358/0xb350 [<0000000015f6b091>] bpf_check.cold+0xc3/0x29d [<000000002973c690>] bpf_prog_load+0x13db/0x2240 [<00000000028d1644>] __sys_bpf+0x1605/0x4ce0 [<00000000053f29bd>] __x64_sys_bpf+0x75/0xb0 [<0000000056fedaf5>] do_syscall_64+0x35/0x80 [<000000002bd58261>] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x63/0xcd

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/06615967d4889b08b19ff3dda96e8b131282f73d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3e210891c4a4c2d858cd6f9f61d5809af251d4df
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/42378a9ca55347102bbf86708776061d8fe3ece2