CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-53645 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bpf: Make bpf_refcount_acquire fallible for non-owning refs This patch fixes an incorrect assumption made in the original bpf_refcount series [0], specifically that the BPF program calling bpf_refcount_acquire on some node can always guarantee that the node is alive. In that series, the patch adding failure behavior to rbtree_add and list_push_{front, back} breaks this assumption for non-owning references. Consider the following program: n = bpf_kptr_xchg(&mapval, NULL); /* skip error checking */ bpf_spin_lock(&l); if(bpf_rbtree_add(&t, &n->rb, less)) { bpf_refcount_acquire(n); /* Failed to add, do something else with the node */ } bpf_spin_unlock(&l); It's incorrect to assume that bpf_refcount_acquire will always succeed in this scenario. bpf_refcount_acquire is being called in a critical section here, but the lock being held is associated with rbtree t, which isn't necessarily the lock associated with the tree that the node is already in. So after bpf_rbtree_add fails to add the node and calls bpf_obj_drop in it, the program has no ownership of the node's lifetime. Therefore the node's refcount can be decr'd to…

Severity

High

CVSS

7.8 (3.1)

Published

2025-10-07

CISA KEV

Not currently listed

Ecosystem

linux/kernel

Weaknesses

CWE-416