published September 16, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
xhci: fix lost bounce buffers on TDs spanning several ring segments
When a TD reaches a link TRB with data that is not aligned to the
endpoint's wMaxPacketSize, xhci_align_td() stages the unalignable tail
through the bounce buffer of the ring segment holding that link TRB.
xhci_unmap_td_bounce_buffer() later unmaps it and, for IN transfers,
copies the data back into the URB's buffer.
The enqueue path records the segment that was bounced in td->bounce_seg,
under the assumption that a TD never spans more than two ring segments.
That assumption does not hold: a TD large enough to span three or more
segments crosses several link TRBs and can be bounced at each of them.
Only the last one survives in td->bounce_seg, so every earlier bounce
buffer is neither copied back nor DMA unmapped.
The URB still completes with actual_length equal to the requested length
and no error, so the transfer looks successful while a wMaxPacketSize
sized hole in the destination buffer silently keeps its previous
contents. It also leaks a DMA mapping per dropped bounce.
Any sufficiently large and fragmented bulk transfer can hit this. It was
found with a USB mass storage device behind xHCI backing a dm-verity
target with 512 byte hash blocks, where the stale data is detected rather
than silently consumed. The device enumerates as SuperSpeed, so
wMaxPacketSize is 1024, while dm-bufio issues one 512 byte bio per hash
block. verity_prefetch_io() makes the block layer merge hundreds of them
into a single request of up to 512 scatterlist entries of 512 bytes each.
At 256 TRBs per ring segment such a TD spans three segments, and every
segment boundary falls on an odd multiple of 512, i.e. unaligned to
wMaxPacketSize. dm-bufio then caches a hash block holding stale data and
dm-verity declares the metadata block corrupted:
device-mapper: verity: 8:2: metadata block 10850 is corrupted
A reproducer running this under qemu is available at
https://github.com/baloo/xhci-verity
The bounce state (bounce_buf, bounce_dma, bounce_len, bounce_offs)
already lives on the ring segment, so there is nothing extra to track.
Keep recording the last bounced segment in td->bounce_seg and, on
completion, walk the segments from td->start_seg up to it, unmapping
every segment that still has a pending bounce.
Stopping at td->bounce_seg rather than td->end_seg matters: a bounce
implies the TD continues past that segment's link TRB, so bounce_seg is
always strictly before end_seg, and a later TD may already have started
in end_seg and been bounced there. Walking that far would copy a foreign
bounce buffer into this URB and unmap it twice. It also keeps the walk
correct if a TD ever wraps the whole ring so that end_seg == start_seg.
[mn: Add ring->num_segs check to prevent unlikely infinite for loop.]