published July 16, 2024
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net: fix a memleak when uncloning an skb dst and its metadata
When uncloning an skb dst and its associated metadata, a new
dst+metadata is allocated and later replaces the old one in the skb.
This is helpful to have a non-shared dst+metadata attached to a specific
skb.
The issue is the uncloned dst+metadata is initialized with a refcount of
1, which is increased to 2 before attaching it to the skb. When
tun_dst_unclone returns, the dst+metadata is only referenced from a
single place (the skb) while its refcount is 2. Its refcount will never
drop to 0 (when the skb is consumed), leading to a memory leak.
Fix this by removing the call to dst_hold in tun_dst_unclone, as the
dst+metadata refcount is already 1.