CVE-2023-53602

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

wifi: ath11k: fix memory leak in WMI firmware stats

Memory allocated for firmware pdev, vdev and beacon statistics are not released during rmmod.

Fix it by calling ath11k_fw_stats_free() function before hardware unregister.

While at it, avoid calling ath11k_fw_stats_free() while processing the firmware stats received in the WMI event because the local list is getting spliced and reinitialised and hence there are no elements in the list after splicing.

Tested-on: QCN9074 hw1.0 PCI WLAN.HK.2.7.0.1-01744-QCAHKSWPL_SILICONZ-1

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/55248d36beb79d3a61c9fb3122dc377fff523c89
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6aafa1c2d3e3fea2ebe84c018003f2a91722e607
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/86f9330a49d1464849482298dd34d361859183eb