CVE-2023-52739 Fix page corruption caused by racy check in __free_pages

2024-05-2115:23:02

Linux

www.cve.org

linux kernel

page corruption

racy check

fix

cve-2023-52739

reference

vmware

inc.

6.7 Medium

AI Score

Confidence

Low

0.0004 Low

EPSS

Percentile

15.6%

JSON

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

Fix page corruption caused by racy check in __free_pages

When we upgraded our kernel, we started seeing some page corruption like
the following consistently:

BUG: Bad page state in process ganesha.nfsd pfn:1304ca
page:0000000022261c55 refcount:0 mapcount:-128 mapping:0000000000000000 index:0x0 pfn:0x1304ca
flags: 0x17ffffc0000000()
raw: 0017ffffc0000000 ffff8a513ffd4c98 ffffeee24b35ec08 0000000000000000
raw: 0000000000000000 0000000000000001 00000000ffffff7f 0000000000000000
page dumped because: nonzero mapcount
CPU: 0 PID: 15567 Comm: ganesha.nfsd Kdump: loaded Tainted: P B O 5.10.158-1.nutanix.20221209.el7.x86_64 #1
Hardware name: VMware, Inc. VMware Virtual Platform/440BX Desktop Reference Platform, BIOS 6.00 04/05/2016
Call Trace:
dump_stack+0x74/0x96
bad_page.cold+0x63/0x94
check_new_page_bad+0x6d/0x80
rmqueue+0x46e/0x970
get_page_from_freelist+0xcb/0x3f0
? _cond_resched+0x19/0x40
__alloc_pages_nodemask+0x164/0x300
alloc_pages_current+0x87/0xf0
skb_page_frag_refill+0x84/0x110
…

Sometimes, it would also show up as corruption in the free list pointer
and cause crashes.

After bisecting the issue, we found the issue started from commit
e320d3012d25 (“mm/page_alloc.c: fix freeing non-compound pages”):

if (put_page_testzero(page))
	free_the_page(page, order);
else if (!PageHead(page))
	while (order-- &gt; 0)
		free_the_page(page + (1 &lt;&lt; order), order);

So the problem is the check PageHead is racy because at this point we
already dropped our reference to the page. So even if we came in with
compound page, the page can already be freed and PageHead can return
false and we will end up freeing all the tail pages causing double free.

CNA Affected

[
  {
    "product": "Linux",
    "vendor": "Linux",
    "defaultStatus": "unaffected",
    "repo": "https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git",
    "programFiles": [
      "mm/page_alloc.c"
    ],
    "versions": [
      {
        "version": "e320d3012d25",
        "lessThan": "0a626e27f984",
        "status": "affected",
        "versionType": "git"
      },
      {
        "version": "e320d3012d25",
        "lessThan": "3af734f3eac6",
        "status": "affected",
        "versionType": "git"
      },
      {
        "version": "e320d3012d25",
        "lessThan": "3b4c045a98f5",
        "status": "affected",
        "versionType": "git"
      },
      {
        "version": "e320d3012d25",
        "lessThan": "462a8e08e0e6",
        "status": "affected",
        "versionType": "git"
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    "product": "Linux",
    "vendor": "Linux",
    "defaultStatus": "affected",
    "repo": "https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git",
    "programFiles": [
      "mm/page_alloc.c"
    ],
    "versions": [
      {
        "version": "5.10",
        "status": "affected"
      },
      {
        "version": "0",
        "lessThan": "5.10",
        "status": "unaffected",
        "versionType": "custom"
      },
      {
        "version": "5.10.168",
        "lessThanOrEqual": "5.10.*",
        "status": "unaffected",
        "versionType": "custom"
      },
      {
        "version": "5.15.94",
        "lessThanOrEqual": "5.15.*",
        "status": "unaffected",
        "versionType": "custom"
      },
      {
        "version": "6.1.12",
        "lessThanOrEqual": "6.1.*",
        "status": "unaffected",
        "versionType": "custom"
      },
      {
        "version": "6.2",
        "lessThanOrEqual": "*",
        "status": "unaffected",
        "versionType": "original_commit_for_fix"
      }
    ]
  }
]