Overview
About vulnerability
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
SUNRPC: auth_gss: fix memory leaks in XDR decoding error paths
The gssx_dec_ctx(), gssx_dec_status(), and gssx_dec_name() functions allocate memory via gssx_dec_buffer(), which calls kmemdup(). When a subsequent decode operation fails, these functions return immediately without freeing previously allocated buffers, causing memory leaks.
The leak in gssx_dec_ctx() is particularly relevant because the caller (gssp_accept_sec_context_upcall) initializes several buffer length fields to non-zero values, resulting in memory allocation:
struct gssx_ctx rctxh = { .exported_context_token.len = GSSX_max_output_handle_sz, .mech.len = GSS_OID_MAX_LEN, .src_name.display_name.len = GSSX_max_princ_sz, .targ_name.display_name.len = GSSX_max_princ_sz };
If, for example, gssx_dec_name() succeeds for src_name but fails for targ_name, the memory allocated for exported_context_token, mech, and src_name.display_name remains unreferenced and cannot be reclaimed.
Add error handling with goto-based cleanup to free any previously allocated buffers before returning an error.
Details
- Affected product:
- AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , Amazon Linux 2 ELS , CentOS 7 ELS , CentOS 8.4 ELS , CentOS 8.5 ELS , CentOS Stream 8 ELS , CloudLinux 7 ELS , Debian 10 ELS , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , RHEL 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , Ubuntu 16.04 ELS , Ubuntu 18.04 ELS , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS
- Affected packages:
- kernel @ 5.14.0 (+16 more)
Fixes
KernelCare state
Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.
| Operating system | Status | Covered kernels |
|---|---|---|
| Debian 11 | Released |
37 kernels
|
| Debian 11 cloud | Released |
17 kernels
|
| Debian 13 | Planned | — |
| Ubuntu 22.04 | Planned | — |
| Ubuntu 24.04 | Released |
45 kernels
|
| Ubuntu 24.04 AWS | Planned | — |