Executive brief
A vulnerability was identified in the Linux kernel's StarFive crypto driver, which is used for hardware-accelerated encryption. A flaw in how the driver handles memory during encryption requests can lead to a memory leak. If triggered repeatedly, this could eventually exhaust system memory, potentially leading to system instability or a denial-of-service condition.
Technical details
A memory leak exists in the starfive_aes_aead_do_one_req() function within the StarFive JH7110 crypto driver (drivers/crypto/starfive/jh7110-aes.c). The function allocates memory for associated data (rctx->adata) using kzalloc() but fails to release this memory if subsequent calls to sg_copy_to_buffer() or starfive_aes_hw_init() fail. This vulnerability is reachable via local cryptographic requests using the affected hardware accelerator. An attacker could potentially cause a denial-of-service by repeatedly triggering these error paths to exhaust kernel memory. The issue has been resolved by adding explicit kfree() calls in the affected error handling paths.
Affected products
- Linux Linux Kernel Versions using StarFive JH7110 crypto driver with DMA support
Timeline
- 2026-01-29: other: Patch submitted by developer
- 2026-02-06: patched: Patch committed to mainline kernel
- 2026-05-27: advisory: CVE published by NVD