VYPR
← All advisories
High severity7.8NVD Advisory· Published May 24, 2024· Updated Aug 4, 2026

CVE-2021-47555

CVE-2021-47555

Description

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

net: vlan: fix underflow for the real_dev refcnt

Inject error before dev_hold(real_dev) in register_vlan_dev(), and execute the following testcase:

ip link add dev dummy1 type dummy ip link add name dummy1.100 link dummy1 type vlan id 100 ip link del dev dummy1

When the dummy netdevice is removed, we will get a WARNING as following:

======================================================================= refcount_t: decrement hit 0; leaking memory. WARNING: CPU: 2 PID: 0 at lib/refcount.c:31 refcount_warn_saturate+0xbf/0x1e0

and an endless loop of:

======================================================================= unregister_netdevice: waiting for dummy1 to become free. Usage count = -1073741824

That is because dev_put(real_dev) in vlan_dev_free() be called without dev_hold(real_dev) in register_vlan_dev(). It makes the refcnt of real_dev underflow.

Move the dev_hold(real_dev) to vlan_dev_init() which is the call-back of ndo_init(). That makes dev_hold() and dev_put() for vlan's real_dev symmetrical.

AI Insight

LLM-synthesized narrative grounded in this CVE's description and references.

Affected products

102

Patches

Vulnerability mechanics

References

4

News mentions

0

No linked articles in our index yet.