CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-52638 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: can: j1939: prevent deadlock by changing j1939_socks_lock to rwlock The following 3 locks would race against each other, causing the deadlock situation in the Syzbot bug report: - j1939_socks_lock - active_session_list_lock - sk_session_queue_lock A reasonable fix is to change j1939_socks_lock to an rwlock, since in the rare situations where a write lock is required for the linked list that j1939_socks_lock is protecting, the code does not attempt to acquire any more locks. This would break the circular lock dependency, where, for example, the current thread already locks j1939_socks_lock and attempts to acquire sk_session_queue_lock, and at the same time, another thread attempts to acquire j1939_socks_lock while holding sk_session_queue_lock. NOTE: This patch along does not fix the unregister_netdevice bug reported by Syzbot; instead, it solves a deadlock situation to prepare for one or more further patches to actually fix the Syzbot bug, which appears to be a reference counting problem within the j1939 codebase. [mkl: remove unrelated newline change]

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-04-03
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-667

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 6.8

Showing 2 representative product identities from 8 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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

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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