CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-42245 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: Revert "sched/fair: Make sure to try to detach at least one movable task" This reverts commit b0defa7ae03ecf91b8bfd10ede430cff12fcbd06. b0defa7ae03ec changed the load balancing logic to ignore env.max_loop if all tasks examined to that point were pinned. The goal of the patch was to make it more likely to be able to detach a task buried in a long list of pinned tasks. However, this has the unfortunate side effect of creating an O(n) iteration in detach_tasks(), as we now must fully iterate every task on a cpu if all or most are pinned. Since this load balance code is done with rq lock held, and often in softirq context, it is very easy to trigger hard lockups. We observed such hard lockups with a user who affined O(10k) threads to a single cpu. When I discussed this with Vincent he initially suggested that we keep the limit on the number of tasks to detach, but increase the number of tasks we can search. However, after some back and forth on the mailing list, he recommended we instead revert the original patch, as it seems likely no one was actually getting hit by the original issue.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-08-07
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-667

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel

Showing 1 representative product identities from 3 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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