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Unrated severityNVD Advisory· Published Sep 15, 2025

vfio/type1: prevent underflow of locked_vm via exec()

CVE-2023-53171

Description

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

vfio/type1: prevent underflow of locked_vm via exec()

When a vfio container is preserved across exec, the task does not change, but it gets a new mm with locked_vm=0, and loses the count from existing dma mappings. If the user later unmaps a dma mapping, locked_vm underflows to a large unsigned value, and a subsequent dma map request fails with ENOMEM in __account_locked_vm.

To avoid underflow, grab and save the mm at the time a dma is mapped. Use that mm when adjusting locked_vm, rather than re-acquiring the saved task's mm, which may have changed. If the saved mm is dead, do nothing.

locked_vm is incremented for existing mappings in a subsequent patch.

Affected products

85

Patches

Vulnerability mechanics

References

5

News mentions

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