CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-29256 — Arm Mali GPU Kernel Driver Use-After-Free Vulnerability

High CVSS 9 CISA KEV

. The Arm Mali GPU kernel driver allows an unprivileged user to achieve access to freed memory, leading to information disclosure or root privilege escalation. This affects Bifrost r16p0 through r29p0 before r30p0, Valhall r19p0 through r29p0 before r30p0, and Midgard r28p0 through r30p0.

Severity
High
CVSS
9 (2.0)
Published
2021-05-24
CISA KEV
Known exploited
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-416

Affected products

  • arm / bifrost_gpu_kernel_driver
  • arm / midgard_gpu_kernel_driver
  • arm / valhall_gpu_kernel_driver

Matched remediation archetype

Use-after-free, double free, and expired resource use

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Trace ownership, references, callbacks, asynchronous tasks, and teardown paths around the affected object or resource.
  • Identify reachable inputs and timing or state transitions that can release the object while references remain.
  • Confirm affected builds, allocators, feature flags, architectures, and process privileges.

Remediate safely

  • Apply the maintained ownership or lifetime fix and rebuild all artifacts containing the affected native code.
  • Use explicit ownership, safe reference management, cancellation and join semantics, and idempotent teardown.
  • Add deterministic lifetime tests plus isolated sanitizer and concurrency coverage for shutdown and error paths.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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