CVE-2025-38334

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

x86/sgx: Prevent attempts to reclaim poisoned pages

TL;DR: SGX page reclaim touches the page to copy its contents to secondary storage. SGX instructions do not gracefully handle machine checks. Despite this, the existing SGX code will try to reclaim pages that it knows are poisoned. Avoid even trying to reclaim poisoned pages.

The longer story:

Pages used by an enclave only get epc_page->poison set in arch_memory_failure() but they currently stay on sgx_active_page_list until sgx_encl_release(), with the SGX_EPC_PAGE_RECLAIMER_TRACKED flag untouched.

epc_page->poison is not checked in the reclaimer logic meaning that, if other conditions are met, an attempt will be made to reclaim an EPC page that was poisoned. This is bad because 1. we dont want that page to end up added to another enclave and 2. it is likely to cause one core to shut down and the kernel to panic.

Specifically, reclaiming uses microcode operations including EWB which accesses the EPC page contents to encrypt and write them out to non-SGX memory. Those operations cannot handle MCEs in their accesses other than by putting the executing core into a special shutdown state (affecting both threads with HT.) The kernel will subsequently panic on the remaining cores seeing the core didnt enter MCE handler(s) in time.

Call sgx_unmark_page_reclaimable() to remove the affected EPC page from sgx_active_page_list on memory error to stop it being considered for reclaiming.

Testing epc_page->poison in sgx_reclaim_pages() would also work but I assume its better to add code in the less likely paths.

The affected EPC page is not added to &node->sgx_poison_page_list until later in sgx_encl_release()->sgx_free_epc_page() when it is EREMOVEd. Membership on other lists doesnt change to avoid changing any of the lists semantics except for sgx_active_page_list. Theres a TBD comment in arch_memory_failure() about pre-emptive actions, the goal here is not to address everything that it may imply.

This also doesnt completely close the time window when a memory error notification will be fatal (for a not previously poisoned EPC page) – the MCE can happen after sgx_reclaim_pages() has selected its candidates or even inside a microcode operation (actually easy to trigger due to the amount of time spent in them.)

The spinlock in sgx_unmark_page_reclaimable() is safe because memory_failure() runs in process context and no spinlocks are held, explicitly noted in a mm/memory-failure.c comment.

Affected Software

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/00a88e9ea1b170d579c56327c38f7e8cf689df87
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/31dcbac94bfeabb86bf85b0c36803fdd6536437b
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/62b62a2a6dc51ed6e8e334861f04220c9cf8106a
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/dc5de5bd6deabd327ced2b2b1d0b4f14cd146afe
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ed16618c380c32c68c06186d0ccbb0d5e0586e59