CVE-2023-53171

Updated on 15 Sep 2025

Severity

5.5 Medium severity

Details

CVSS score
5.5
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Overview

About vulnerability

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

vfio/type1: prevent underflow of locked_vm via exec()

When a vfio container is preserved across exec, the task does not change, but it gets a new mm with locked_vm=0, and loses the count from existing dma mappings. If the user later unmaps a dma mapping, locked_vm underflows to a large unsigned value, and a subsequent dma map request fails with ENOMEM in __account_locked_vm.

To avoid underflow, grab and save the mm at the time a dma is mapped. Use that mm when adjusting locked_vm, rather than re-acquiring the saved task’s mm, which may have changed. If the saved mm is dead, do nothing.

locked_vm is incremented for existing mappings in a subsequent patch.

Details

Affected packages:
linux @ 5.4.0 (+13 more)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

vfio/type1: prevent underflow of locked_vm via exec()

When a vfio container is preserved across exec, the task does not change, but it gets a new mm with locked_vm=0, and loses the count from existing dma mappings. If the user later unmaps a dma mapping, locked_vm underflows to a large unsigned value, and a subsequent dma map request fails with ENOMEM in __account_locked_vm.

To avoid underflow, grab and save the mm at the time a dma is mapped. Use that mm when adjusting locked_vm, rather than re-acquiring the saved task’s mm, which may have changed. If the saved mm is dead, do nothing.

locked_vm is incremented for existing mappings in a subsequent patch.

Fixes