CVE-2024-50236

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

wifi: ath10k: Fix memory leak in management tx

In the current logic, memory is allocated for storing the MSDU context during management packet TX but this memory is not being freed during management TX completion. Similar leaks are seen in the management TX cleanup logic.

Kmemleak reports this problem as below,

unreferenced object 0xffffff80b64ed250 (size 16): comm kworker/u16:7, pid 148, jiffies 4294687130 (age 714.199s) hex dump (first 16 bytes): 00 2b d8 d8 80 ff ff ff c4 74 e9 fd 07 00 00 00 .+…….t…… backtrace: [] __kmem_cache_alloc_node+0x1e4/0x2d8 [] kmalloc_trace+0x48/0x110 [] ath10k_wmi_tlv_op_gen_mgmt_tx_send+0xd4/0x1d8 [ath10k_core] [] ath10k_mgmt_over_wmi_tx_work+0x134/0x298 [ath10k_core] [] process_scheduled_works+0x1ac/0x400 [] worker_thread+0x208/0x328 [] kthread+0x100/0x1c0 [] ret_from_fork+0x10/0x20

Free the memory during completion and cleanup to fix the leak.

Protect the mgmt_pending_tx idr_remove() operation in ath10k_wmi_tlv_op_cleanup_mgmt_tx_send() using ar->data_lock similar to other instances.

Tested-on: WCN3990 hw1.0 SNOC WLAN.HL.2.0-01387-QCAHLSWMTPLZ-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/2f6f1e26ac6d2b38e2198a71f81f0ade14d6b07b
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4112450da7d67b59ccedc2208bae622db17dbcb8
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5f5a939759c79e7385946c85e62feca51a18d816
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6cc23898e6ba47e976050d3c080b4d2c1add3748
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6fc9af3df6ca7f3c94774d20f62dc7b49616026d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/705be2dc45c7f852e211e16bc41a916fab741983
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e15d84b3bba187aa372dff7c58ce1fd5cb48a076
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/eff818238bedb9c2484c251ec46f9f160911cdc0
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/01/msg00001.html
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/03/msg00002.html