CVE-2022-49546

x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer

published February 26, 2025

CVSS
—
EPSS
0%
Percentile
19.1
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer

This is reported by kmemleak detector:

unreferenced object 0xffffc900002a9000 (size 4096):

comm "kexec", pid 14950, jiffies 4295110793 (age 373.951s)

hex dump (first 32 bytes):

7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 .ELF............

04 00 3e 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ..>.............

backtrace:

[<0000000016a8ef9f>] __vmalloc_node_range+0x101/0x170

[<000000002b66b6c0>] __vmalloc_node+0xb4/0x160

[<00000000ad40107d>] crash_prepare_elf64_headers+0x8e/0xcd0

[<0000000019afff23>] crash_load_segments+0x260/0x470

[<0000000019ebe95c>] bzImage64_load+0x814/0xad0

[<0000000093e16b05>] arch_kexec_kernel_image_load+0x1be/0x2a0

[<000000009ef2fc88>] kimage_file_alloc_init+0x2ec/0x5a0

[<0000000038f5a97a>] __do_sys_kexec_file_load+0x28d/0x530

[<0000000087c19992>] do_syscall_64+0x3b/0x90

[<0000000066e063a4>] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xae

In crash_prepare_elf64_headers(), a buffer is allocated via vmalloc() to

store elf headers. While it's not freed back to system correctly when

kdump kernel is reloaded or unloaded. Then memory leak is caused. Fix it

by introducing x86 specific function arch_kimage_file_post_load_cleanup(),

and freeing the buffer there.

And also remove the incorrect elf header buffer freeing code. Before

calling arch specific kexec_file loading function, the image instance has

been initialized. So 'image->elf_headers' must be NULL. It doesn't make

sense to free the elf header buffer in the place.

Three different people have reported three bugs about the memory leak on

x86_64 inside Redhat.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00278 · 19.1th percentile
Published
2025-02-26T02:13Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 26 FEB 02:13Z
    x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer
    cvelistv5