CyberAlerts is shutting down on June 30th, 2025. Thank you for your support!

CVE-2024-42102: Revert "mm/writeback: fix possible divide-by-zero in wb_dirty_limits(), again"

4.7 CVSS

Description

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

Revert "mm/writeback: fix possible divide-by-zero in wb_dirty_limits(), again"

Patch series "mm: Avoid possible overflows in dirty throttling".

Dirty throttling logic assumes dirty limits in page units fit into
32-bits. This patch series makes sure this is true (see patch 2/2 for
more details).

This patch (of 2):

This reverts commit 9319b647902cbd5cc884ac08a8a6d54ce111fc78.

The commit is broken in several ways. Firstly, the removed (u64) cast
from the multiplication will introduce a multiplication overflow on 32-bit
archs if wb_thresh * bg_thresh >= 1<<32 (which is actually common - the
default settings with 4GB of RAM will trigger this). Secondly, the
div64_u64() is unnecessarily expensive on 32-bit archs. We have
div64_ul() in case we want to be safe & cheap. Thirdly, if dirty
thresholds are larger than 1<<32 pages, then dirty balancing is going to
blow up in many other spectacular ways anyway so trying to fix one
possible overflow is just moot.

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2024-42102

CVSS Base Severity: MEDIUM

CVSS Base Score: 4.7

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

Affected Products

Vendor: Linux

Product: Linux

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.08% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 25.62% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-06-02 (when was this score calculated)

Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC)

SSVC Exploitation: none

SSVC Technical Impact: partial

SSVC Automatable: false

References

Timeline

2025-05-04 10:40:15 UTC
CVE

Revert "mm/writeback: fix possible divide-by-zero in wb_dirty_limits(), again"