Executive brief
A memory leak was identified in the Renesas I3C controller driver within the Linux kernel. This component manages high-speed communication between a computer's processor and peripheral sensors or devices. If exploited or triggered repeatedly, this leak could gradually consume system memory, potentially leading to reduced system performance or a crash.
Technical details
A memory leak exists in the renesas_i3c_i3c_xfers() function within drivers/i3c/master/renesas-i3c.c. The vulnerability stems from the failure to free the 'xfer' structure allocated by renesas_i3c_alloc_xfer() before the function returns. An attacker or a series of legitimate I3C transfer operations could trigger this leak, leading to kernel memory exhaustion. The fix implements the __free(kfree) cleanup attribute to ensure the memory is automatically released when the variable goes out of scope. Patches have been backported to various stable kernel branches.
Affected products
- Linux Linux Kernel 6.17 to 6.18.33, 7.0.10, 7.1
Timeline
- 2026-06-24: disclosed: CVE published by kernel.org
- 2026-04-12: patched: Initial fix committed to mainline kernel