CVE-2022-50446

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

ARC: mm: fix leakage of memory allocated for PTE

Since commit d9820ff (ARC: mm: switch pgtable_t back to struct page *) a memory leakage problem occurs. Memory allocated for page table entries not released during process termination. This issue can be reproduced by a small program that allocates a large amount of memory. After several runs, youll see that the amount of free memory has reduced and will continue to reduce after each run. All ARC CPUs are effected by this issue. The issue was introduced since the kernel stable release v5.15-rc1.

As described in commit d9820ff after switch pgtable_t back to struct page *, a pointer to struct page and appropriate functions are used to allocate and free a memory page for PTEs, but the pmd_pgtable macro hasnt changed and returns the direct virtual address from the PMD (PGD) entry. Than this address used as a parameter in the __pte_free() and as a result this function couldnt release memory page allocated for PTEs.

Fix this issue by changing the pmd_pgtable macro and returning pointer to struct page.

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/14009ada5712649589ab4ad0441b811780ea8773
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4fd9df10cb7a9289fbd22d669f9f98164d95a1ce
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d83a69966e8b6ae9dd447f3ac704c0223bceb7f7