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Unrated severityNVD Advisory· Published Mar 4, 2024· Updated May 4, 2025

kfence: fix memory leak when cat kfence objects

CVE-2021-47089

Description

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

kfence: fix memory leak when cat kfence objects

Hulk robot reported a kmemleak problem:

unreferenced object 0xffff93d1d8cc02e8 (size 248): comm "cat", pid 23327, jiffies 4624670141 (age 495992.217s) hex dump (first 32 bytes): 00 40 85 19 d4 93 ff ff 00 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 .@.............. 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ backtrace: seq_open+0x2a/0x80 full_proxy_open+0x167/0x1e0 do_dentry_open+0x1e1/0x3a0 path_openat+0x961/0xa20 do_filp_open+0xae/0x120 do_sys_openat2+0x216/0x2f0 do_sys_open+0x57/0x80 do_syscall_64+0x33/0x40 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9 unreferenced object 0xffff93d419854000 (size 4096): comm "cat", pid 23327, jiffies 4624670141 (age 495992.217s) hex dump (first 32 bytes): 6b 66 65 6e 63 65 2d 23 32 35 30 3a 20 30 78 30 kfence-#250: 0x0 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 37 35 34 62 64 61 31 32 2d 0000000754bda12- backtrace: seq_read_iter+0x313/0x440 seq_read+0x14b/0x1a0 full_proxy_read+0x56/0x80 vfs_read+0xa5/0x1b0 ksys_read+0xa0/0xf0 do_syscall_64+0x33/0x40 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9

I find that we can easily reproduce this problem with the following commands:

cat /sys/kernel/debug/kfence/objects echo scan > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

The leaked memory is allocated in the stack below:

do_syscall_64 do_sys_open do_dentry_open full_proxy_open seq_open ---> alloc seq_file vfs_read full_proxy_read seq_read seq_read_iter traverse ---> alloc seq_buf

And it should have been released in the following process:

do_syscall_64 syscall_exit_to_user_mode exit_to_user_mode_prepare task_work_run ____fput __fput full_proxy_release ---> free here

However, the release function corresponding to file_operations is not implemented in kfence. As a result, a memory leak occurs. Therefore, the solution to this problem is to implement the corresponding release function.

Affected products

48

Patches

0

No patches discovered yet.

Vulnerability mechanics

AI mechanics synthesis has not run for this CVE yet.

References

2

News mentions

0

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