CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-47214 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: hugetlb, userfaultfd: fix reservation restore on userfaultfd error Currently in the is_continue case in hugetlb_mcopy_atomic_pte(), if we bail out using "goto out_release_unlock;" in the cases where idx >= size, or !huge_pte_none(), the code will detect that new_pagecache_page == false, and so call restore_reserve_on_error(). In this case I see restore_reserve_on_error() delete the reservation, and the following call to remove_inode_hugepages() will increment h->resv_hugepages causing a 100% reproducible leak. We should treat the is_continue case similar to adding a page into the pagecache and set new_pagecache_page to true, to indicate that there is no reservation to restore on the error path, and we need not call restore_reserve_on_error(). Rename new_pagecache_page to page_in_pagecache to make that clear.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-04-10
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 5.13.13
  • linux / linux_kernel / 5.16

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

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

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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