published December 9, 2025
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
arm64: mte: Avoid setting PG_mte_tagged if no tags cleared or restored
Prior to commit 69e3b846d8a7 ("arm64: mte: Sync tags for pages where PTE
is untagged"), mte_sync_tags() was only called for pte_tagged() entries
(those mapped with PROT_MTE). Therefore mte_sync_tags() could safely use
test_and_set_bit(PG_mte_tagged, &page->flags) without inadvertently
setting PG_mte_tagged on an untagged page.
The above commit was required as guests may enable MTE without any
control at the stage 2 mapping, nor a PROT_MTE mapping in the VMM.
However, the side-effect was that any page with a PTE that looked like
swap (or migration) was getting PG_mte_tagged set automatically. A
subsequent page copy (e.g. migration) copied the tags to the destination
page even if the tags were owned by KASAN.
This issue was masked by the page_kasan_tag_reset() call introduced in
commit e5b8d9218951 ("arm64: mte: reset the page tag in page->flags").
When this commit was reverted (20794545c146), KASAN started reporting
access faults because the overriding tags in a page did not match the
original page->flags (with CONFIG_KASAN_HW_TAGS=y):
BUG: KASAN: invalid-access in copy_page+0x10/0xd0 arch/arm64/lib/copy_page.S:26
Read at addr f5ff000017f2e000 by task syz-executor.1/2218
Pointer tag: [f5], memory tag: [f2]
Move the PG_mte_tagged bit setting from mte_sync_tags() to the actual
place where tags are cleared (mte_sync_page_tags()) or restored
(mte_restore_tags()).