CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-52489 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 4.7

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/sparsemem: fix race in accessing memory_section->usage The below race is observed on a PFN which falls into the device memory region with the system memory configuration where PFN's are such that [ZONE_NORMAL ZONE_DEVICE ZONE_NORMAL]. Since normal zone start and end pfn contains the device memory PFN's as well, the compaction triggered will try on the device memory PFN's too though they end up in NOP(because pfn_to_online_page() returns NULL for ZONE_DEVICE memory sections). When from other core, the section mappings are being removed for the ZONE_DEVICE region, that the PFN in question belongs to, on which compaction is currently being operated is resulting into the kernel crash with CONFIG_SPASEMEM_VMEMAP enabled. The crash logs can be seen at [1]. compact_zone() memunmap_pages ------------- --------------- __pageblock_pfn_to_page ...... (a)pfn_valid(): valid_section()//return true (b)__remove_pages()-> sparse_remove_section()-> section_deactivate(): [Free the array ms->usage and set ms->usage = NULL] pfn_section_valid() [Access ms->usage which is NULL] NOTE: From the above it can be said that the race is red…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4.7 (3.1)
Published
2024-03-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-362

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0

Showing 2 representative product identities from 6 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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