published December 22, 2025
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
comedi: pcl818: fix null-ptr-deref in pcl818_ai_cancel()
Syzbot identified an issue [1] in pcl818_ai_cancel(), which stems from
the fact that in case of early device detach via pcl818_detach(),
subdevice dev->read_subdev may not have initialized its pointer to
&struct comedi_async as intended. Thus, any such dereferencing of
&s->async->cmd will lead to general protection fault and kernel crash.
Mitigate this problem by removing a call to pcl818_ai_cancel() from
pcl818_detach() altogether. This way, if the subdevice setups its
support for async commands, everything async-related will be
handled via subdevice's own ->cancel() function in
comedi_device_detach_locked() even before pcl818_detach(). If no
support for asynchronous commands is provided, there is no need
to cancel anything either.
[1] Syzbot crash:
Oops: general protection fault, probably for non-canonical address 0xdffffc0000000005: 0000 [#1] SMP KASAN PTI
KASAN: null-ptr-deref in range [0x0000000000000028-0x000000000000002f]
CPU: 1 UID: 0 PID: 6050 Comm: syz.0.18 Not tainted syzkaller #0 PREEMPT(full)
Hardware name: Google Google Compute Engine/Google Compute Engine, BIOS Google 08/18/2025
RIP: 0010:pcl818_ai_cancel+0x69/0x3f0 drivers/comedi/drivers/pcl818.c:762
...
Call Trace:
<TASK>
pcl818_detach+0x66/0xd0 drivers/comedi/drivers/pcl818.c:1115
comedi_device_detach_locked+0x178/0x750 drivers/comedi/drivers.c:207
do_devconfig_ioctl drivers/comedi/comedi_fops.c:848 [inline]
comedi_unlocked_ioctl+0xcde/0x1020 drivers/comedi/comedi_fops.c:2178
vfs_ioctl fs/ioctl.c:51 [inline]
__do_sys_ioctl fs/ioctl.c:597 [inline]
...