CVE-2023-54123

Vulnerability

Description

CVE-2023-54123 is a memory leak vulnerability in the Linux kernel's md/raid10 driver. The issue arises in the raid10_run() function, where during error handling, the conf structure is freed but the conf->bio_split member is not properly deallocated, causing [1] a memory leak. The kernel's official message confirms that there are three places where conf is freed, and a helper function was introduced to ensure all allocated resources, including bio_split, are correctly released [1].

Exploitation and

Impact

This vulnerability is triggered during the initialization of a RAID10 array when an error occurs in raid10_run(). An attacker with the ability to cause such an error (e.g., by providing invalid parameters or triggering a device failure) could repeatedly exploit this to exhaust system memory, leading to a denial-of-service condition. No authentication is required if the attacker can influence the RAID configuration, but local access or privileged capabilities are typically needed to manage MD devices.

Mitigation

The fix was applied to the Linux kernel stable tree in commit 133008af833b [1] and backported to other stable versions [2][3][4]. Users should update their kernel to include the patched version. No workaround is available other than applying the kernel patch [1] or avoiding the use of RAID10 in error-prone scenarios until patched.", "citations": [1, 2, 3, 4] } ```