VYPR
Medium severity5.5NVD Advisory· Published Feb 28, 2024· Updated Jun 17, 2026

CVE-2021-46986

CVE-2021-46986

Description

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

usb: dwc3: gadget: Free gadget structure only after freeing endpoints

As part of commit e81a7018d93a ("usb: dwc3: allocate gadget structure dynamically") the dwc3_gadget_release() was added which will free the dwc->gadget structure upon the device's removal when usb_del_gadget_udc() is called in dwc3_gadget_exit().

However, simply freeing the gadget results a dangling pointer situation: the endpoints created in dwc3_gadget_init_endpoints() have their dep->endpoint.ep_list members chained off the list_head anchored at dwc->gadget->ep_list. Thus when dwc->gadget is freed, the first dwc3_ep in the list now has a dangling prev pointer and likewise for the next pointer of the dwc3_ep at the tail of the list. The dwc3_gadget_free_endpoints() that follows will result in a use-after-free when it calls list_del().

This was caught by enabling KASAN and performing a driver unbind. The recent commit 568262bf5492 ("usb: dwc3: core: Add shutdown callback for dwc3") also exposes this as a panic during shutdown.

There are a few possibilities to fix this. One could be to perform a list_del() of the gadget->ep_list itself which removes it from the rest of the dwc3_ep chain.

Another approach is what this patch does, by splitting up the usb_del_gadget_udc() call into its separate "del" and "put" components. This allows dwc3_gadget_free_endpoints() to be called before the gadget is finally freed with usb_put_gadget().

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