CVE-2025-38345

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

ACPICA: fix acpi operand cache leak in dswstate.c

ACPICA commit 987a3b5cf7175916e2a4b6ea5b8e70f830dfe732

I found an ACPI cache leak in ACPI early termination and boot continuing case.

When early termination occurs due to malicious ACPI table, Linux kernel terminates ACPI function and continues to boot process. While kernel terminates ACPI function, kmem_cache_destroy() reports Acpi-Operand cache leak.

Boot log of ACPI operand cache leak is as follows:

[ 0.585957] ACPI: Added _OSI(Module Device) [ 0.587218] ACPI: Added _OSI(Processor Device) [ 0.588530] ACPI: Added _OSI(3.0 _SCP Extensions) [ 0.589790] ACPI: Added _OSI(Processor Aggregator Device) [ 0.591534] ACPI Error: Illegal I/O port address/length above 64K: C806E00000004002/0x2 (20170303/hwvalid-155) [ 0.594351] ACPI Exception: AE_LIMIT, Unable to initialize fixed events (20170303/evevent-88) [ 0.597858] ACPI: Unable to start the ACPI Interpreter [ 0.599162] ACPI Error: Could not remove SCI handler (20170303/evmisc-281) [ 0.601836] kmem_cache_destroy Acpi-Operand: Slab cache still has objects [ 0.603556] CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 4.12.0-rc5 #26 [ 0.605159] Hardware name: innotek gmb_h virtual_box/virtual_box, BIOS virtual_box 12/01/2006 [ 0.609177] Call Trace: [ 0.610063] ? dump_stack+0x5c/0x81 [ 0.611118] ? kmem_cache_destroy+0x1aa/0x1c0 [ 0.612632] ? acpi_sleep_proc_init+0x27/0x27 [ 0.613906] ? acpi_os_delete_cache+0xa/0x10 [ 0.617986] ? acpi_ut_delete_caches+0x3f/0x7b [ 0.619293] ? acpi_terminate+0xa/0x14 [ 0.620394] ? acpi_init+0x2af/0x34f [ 0.621616] ? __class_create+0x4c/0x80 [ 0.623412] ? video_setup+0x7f/0x7f [ 0.624585] ? acpi_sleep_proc_init+0x27/0x27 [ 0.625861] ? do_one_initcall+0x4e/0x1a0 [ 0.627513] ? kernel_init_freeable+0x19e/0x21f [ 0.628972] ? rest_init+0x80/0x80 [ 0.630043] ? kernel_init+0xa/0x100 [ 0.631084] ? ret_from_fork+0x25/0x30 [ 0.633343] vgaarb: loaded [ 0.635036] EDAC MC: Ver: 3.0.0 [ 0.638601] PCI: Probing PCI hardware [ 0.639833] PCI host bridge to bus 0000:00 [ 0.641031] pci_bus 0000:00: root bus resource [io 0x0000-0xffff] … Continue to boot and log is omitted …

I analyzed this memory leak in detail and found acpi_ds_obj_stack_pop_and_ delete() function miscalculated the top of the stack. acpi_ds_obj_stack_push() function uses walk_state->operand_index for start position of the top, but acpi_ds_obj_stack_pop_and_delete() function considers index 0 for it. Therefore, this causes acpi operand memory leak.

This cache leak causes a security threat because an old kernel (<= 4.9) shows memory locations of kernel functions in stack dump. Some malicious users could use this information to neutralize kernel ASLR.

I made a patch to fix ACPI operand cache leak.

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/156fd20a41e776bbf334bd5e45c4f78dfc90ce1c
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1c0d9115a001979cb446ba5e8331dd1d29a10bbf
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4fa430a8bca708c7776f6b9d001257f48b19a5b7
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5a68893b594ee6ce0efce5f74c07e64e9dd0c2c4
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/64c4bcf0308dd1d752ef31d560040b8725e29984
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/755a8006b76792922ff7b1c9674d8897a476b5d7
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/76d37168155880f2b04a0aad92ceb0f9d799950e
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e0783910ca4368b01466bc8dcdcc13c3e0b7db53
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/10/msg00007.html
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/10/msg00008.html