CVE-2025-37807

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

bpf: Fix kmemleak warning for percpu hashmap

Vlad Poenaru reported the following kmemleak issue:

unreferenced object 0x606fd7c44ac8 (size 32): backtrace (crc 0): pcpu_alloc_noprof+0x730/0xeb0 bpf_map_alloc_percpu+0x69/0xc0 prealloc_init+0x9d/0x1b0 htab_map_alloc+0x363/0x510 map_create+0x215/0x3a0 __sys_bpf+0x16b/0x3e0 __x64_sys_bpf+0x18/0x20 do_syscall_64+0x7b/0x150 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x4b/0x53

Further investigation shows the reason is due to not 8-byte aligned store of percpu pointer in htab_elem_set_ptr(): *(void __percpu **)(l->key + key_size) = pptr;

Note that the whole htab_elem alignment is 8 (for x86_64). If the key_size is 4, that means pptr is stored in a location which is 4 byte aligned but not 8 byte aligned. In mm/kmemleak.c, scan_block() scans the memory based on 8 byte stride, so it wont detect above pptr, hence reporting the memory leak.

In htab_map_alloc(), we already have

    htab->elem_size = sizeof(struct htab_elem) +
                      round_up(htab->map.key_size, 8);
    if (percpu)
            htab->elem_size += sizeof(void *);
    else
            htab->elem_size += round_up(htab->map.value_size, 8);

So storing pptr with 8-byte alignment wont cause any problem and can fix kmemleak too.

The issue can be reproduced with bpf selftest as well:

1. Enable CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK config
2. Add a getchar() before skel destroy in test_hash_map() in prog_tests/for_each.c. The purpose is to keep map available so kmemleak can be detected.
3. run ./test_progs -t for_each/hash_map & and a kmemleak should be reported.

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/11ba7ce076e5903e7bdc1fd1498979c331b3c286
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1f1c29aa1934177349c17e3c32e68ec38a7a56df
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7758e308aeda1038aba1944f7302d34161b3effe