CVE-2026-46289

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

lib/scatterlist: fix length calculations in extract_kvec_to_sg

Patch series Fix bugs in extract_iter_to_sg(), v3.

Fix bugs in the kvec and user variants of extract_iter_to_sg. This series is growing due to useful remarks made by sashiko.dev.

The main bugs are:

• The length for an sglist entry when extracting from a kvec can exceed the number of bytes in the page. This is obviously not intended.
• When extracting a user buffer the sglist is temporarily used as a scratch buffer for extracted page pointers. If the sglist already contains some elements this scratch buffer could overlap with existing entries in the sglist.

The series adds test cases to the kunit_iov_iter test that demonstrate all of these bugs. Additionally, there is a memory leak fix for the test itself.

The bugs were orignally introduced into kernel v6.3 where the function lived in fs/netfs/iterator.c. It was later moved to lib/scatterlist.c in v6.5. Thus the actual fix is only marked for backports to v6.5+.

This patch (of 5):

When extracting from a kvec to a scatterlist, do not cross page boundaries. The required length was already calculated but not used as intended.

Adjust the copied length if the loop runs out of sglist entries without extracting everything.

While there, return immediately from extract_iter_to_sg if there are no sglist entries at all.

A subsequent commit will add kunit test cases that demonstrate that the patch is necessary.

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/07b7d66e65d9cfe6b9c2c34aa22cfcaac37a5c45
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3f17500e86d730c76db638bb3ae52f9b5e496c76
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8fbba6829057979149d1b37d65690c037f3ddf4d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/9d38756d0a93b66163554219fa9c3365f40c4035
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e5e22fc9963469e678c4f4bb38d26adcec107f1e