CVE-2024-41084

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

cxl/region: Avoid null pointer dereference in region lookup

cxl_dpa_to_region() looks up a region based on a memdev and DPA. It wrongly assumes an endpoint found mapping the DPA is also of a fully assembled region. When not true it leads to a null pointer dereference looking up the region name.

This appears during testing of region lookup after a failure to assemble a BIOS defined region or if the lookup raced with the assembly of the BIOS defined region.

Failure to clean up BIOS defined regions that fail assembly is an issue in itself and a fix to that problem will alleviate some of the impact. It will not alleviate the race condition so lets harden this path.

The behavior change is that the kernel oops due to a null pointer dereference is replaced with a dev_dbg() message noting that an endpoint was mapped.

Additional comments are added so that future users of this function can more clearly understand what it provides.

Weakness

A NULL pointer dereference occurs when the application dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid, but is NULL, typically causing a crash or exit.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/285f2a08841432fc3e498b1cd00cce5216cdf189
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a9e099e29e925f8b31cfe53e8a786b9796f8e453
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b8a40a6dbfb0150c1081384caa9bbe28ce5d5060
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/285f2a08841432fc3e498b1cd00cce5216cdf189
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a9e099e29e925f8b31cfe53e8a786b9796f8e453
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b8a40a6dbfb0150c1081384caa9bbe28ce5d5060