CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-46042 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/mempolicy: fix memory leaks in weighted_interleave_auto_store() weighted_interleave_auto_store() fetches old_wi_state inside the if (!input) block only. This causes two memory leaks: 1. When a user writes "false" and the current mode is already manual, the function returns early without freeing the freshly allocated new_wi_state. 2. When a user writes "true", old_wi_state stays NULL because the fetch is skipped entirely. The old state is then overwritten by rcu_assign_pointer() but never freed, since the cleanup path is gated on old_wi_state being non-NULL. A user can trigger this repeatedly by writing "1" in a loop. Fix both leaks by moving the old_wi_state fetch before the input check, making it unconditional. This also allows a unified early return for both "true" and "false" when the requested mode matches the current mode. Reviewed by: Donet Tom <donettom@linux.ibm.com>

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-05-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel

Showing 1 representative product identities from 2 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

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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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