CVE-2025-38062

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

genirq/msi: Store the IOMMU IOVA directly in msi_desc instead of iommu_cookie

The IOMMU translation for MSI message addresses has been a 2-step process, separated in time:

1. iommu_dma_prepare_msi(): A cookie pointer containing the IOVA address is stored in the MSI descriptor when an MSI interrupt is allocated.

2. iommu_dma_compose_msi_msg(): this cookie pointer is used to compute a translated message address.

This has an inherent lifetime problem for the pointer stored in the cookie that must remain valid between the two steps. However, there is no locking at the irq layer that helps protect the lifetime. Today, this works under the assumption that the iommu domain is not changed while MSI interrupts being programmed. This is true for normal DMA API users within the kernel, as the iommu domain is attached before the driver is probed and cannot be changed while a driver is attached.

Classic VFIO type1 also prevented changing the iommu domain while VFIO was running as it does not support changing the container after starting up.

However, iommufd has improved this so that the iommu domain can be changed during VFIO operation. This potentially allows userspace to directly race VFIO_DEVICE_ATTACH_IOMMUFD_PT (which calls iommu_attach_group()) and VFIO_DEVICE_SET_IRQS (which calls into iommu_dma_compose_msi_msg()).

This potentially causes both the cookie pointer and the unlocked call to iommu_get_domain_for_dev() on the MSI translation path to become UAFs.

Fix the MSI cookie UAF by removing the cookie pointer. The translated IOVA address is already known during iommu_dma_prepare_msi() and cannot change. Thus, it can simply be stored as an integer in the MSI descriptor.

The other UAF related to iommu_get_domain_for_dev() will be addressed in patch iommu: Make iommu_dma_prepare_msi() into a generic operation by using the IOMMU group mutex.

Affected Software

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1f7df3a691740a7736bbc99dc4ed536120eb4746
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/53f42776e435f63e5f8e61955e4c205dbfeaf524
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/856152eb91e67858a09e30a7149a1f29b04b7384
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ba41e4e627db51d914444aee0b93eb67f31fa330
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e4d3763223c7b72ded53425207075e7453b4e3d5