CVE-2024-41066

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

ibmvnic: Add tx check to prevent skb leak

Below is a summary of how the driver stores a reference to an skb during transmit: tx_buff[free_map[consumer_index]]->skb = new_skb; free_map[consumer_index] = IBMVNIC_INVALID_MAP; consumer_index ++; Where variable data looks like this: free_map == [4, IBMVNIC_INVALID_MAP, IBMVNIC_INVALID_MAP, 0, 3] consumer_index^ tx_buff == [skb=null, skb=, skb=, skb=null, skb=null]

The driver has checks to ensure that free_map[consumer_index] pointed to a valid index but there was no check to ensure that this index pointed to an unused/null skb address. So, if, by some chance, our free_map and tx_buff lists become out of sync then we were previously risking an skb memory leak. This could then cause tcp congestion control to stop sending packets, eventually leading to ETIMEDOUT.

Therefore, add a conditional to ensure that the skb address is null. If not then warn the user (because this is still a bug that should be patched) and free the old pointer to prevent memleak/tcp problems.

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/0983d288caf984de0202c66641577b739caad561
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/16ad1557cae582e79bb82dddd612d9bdfaa11d4c
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/267c61c4afed0ff9a2e83462abad3f41d8ca1f06
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e7b75def33eae61ddaad6cb616c517dc3882eb2a
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0983d288caf984de0202c66641577b739caad561
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/16ad1557cae582e79bb82dddd612d9bdfaa11d4c
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/267c61c4afed0ff9a2e83462abad3f41d8ca1f06
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e7b75def33eae61ddaad6cb616c517dc3882eb2a
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/01/msg00001.html