Description

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

Fix page corruption caused by racy check in __free_pages

When we upgraded our kernel, we started seeing some page corruption like
the following consistently:

BUG: Bad page state in process ganesha.nfsd pfn:1304ca
page:0000000022261c55 refcount:0 mapcount:-128 mapping:0000000000000000 index:0x0 pfn:0x1304ca
flags: 0x17ffffc0000000()
raw: 0017ffffc0000000 ffff8a513ffd4c98 ffffeee24b35ec08 0000000000000000
raw: 0000000000000000 0000000000000001 00000000ffffff7f 0000000000000000
page dumped because: nonzero mapcount
CPU: 0 PID: 15567 Comm: ganesha.nfsd Kdump: loaded Tainted: P B O 5.10.158-1.nutanix.20221209.el7.x86_64 #1
Hardware name: VMware, Inc. VMware Virtual Platform/440BX Desktop Reference Platform, BIOS 6.00 04/05/2016
Call Trace:
dump_stack+0x74/0x96
bad_page.cold+0x63/0x94
check_new_page_bad+0x6d/0x80
rmqueue+0x46e/0x970
get_page_from_freelist+0xcb/0x3f0
? _cond_resched+0x19/0x40
__alloc_pages_nodemask+0x164/0x300
alloc_pages_current+0x87/0xf0
skb_page_frag_refill+0x84/0x110
...

Sometimes, it would also show up as corruption in the free list pointer
and cause crashes.

After bisecting the issue, we found the issue started from commit
e320d3012d25 ("mm/page_alloc.c: fix freeing non-compound pages"):

if (put_page_testzero(page))
free_the_page(page, order);
else if (!PageHead(page))
while (order-- > 0)
free_the_page(page + (1 <<...

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2023-52739

Affected Products

Vendor: Linux

Product: Linux

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.05% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 17.81% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-02-03 (when was this score calculated)

References

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0a626e27f984dfbe96bd8e4fd08f20a2ede3ea23
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3af734f3eac6f70ef8e272a80da40544b9d0f2b5
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3b4c045a98f53a8890a94bb5846a390c8e39e673
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/462a8e08e0e6287e5ce13187257edbf24213ed03

Timeline