Junglewise Threat Intelligence

CVE-2024-27077: Linux Kernel memory leak in v4l2_m2m_register_entity

CVE-2024-27077 · Severity: medium · CVSS 5.5 · Published 2024-05-01

Technologies: Linux Kernel. Vendors: Linux.

Executive brief

A vulnerability was identified in the Linux kernel's media subsystem, specifically within the component that handles memory-to-memory video processing. A technical error in how the system manages memory during certain failure scenarios can lead to a memory leak. Over time, this could allow a local user to exhaust system resources, potentially leading to a system crash or degraded performance.

Technical details

A memory leak (CWE-401) exists in the v4l2_m2m_register_entity function within drivers/media/v4l2-core/v4l2-mem2mem.c. The vulnerability occurs because the 'entity->name' field is allocated during registration but is not properly deallocated if subsequent error-handling paths are triggered (such as failures in media_entity_pads_init or media_device_register_entity). A local attacker with basic privileges could potentially trigger these error paths repeatedly to exhaust kernel memory, leading to a denial of service. The issue has been resolved by adding kfree() calls to the affected error paths in various stable kernel branches.

Affected products

  • Linux Linux Kernel 4.19 to 4.19.311, 4.20 to 5.4.273, 5.5 to 5.10.214, 5.11 to 5.15.153, 5.16 to 6.1.83, 6.2 to 6.6.23, 6.7 to 6.7.11, 6.8 to 6.8.2

Timeline

  • 2024-05-01: disclosed: CVE published
  • 2024-03-26: patched: Fixes committed to stable kernel branches

References

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