Description

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

fork: only invoke khugepaged, ksm hooks if no error

There is no reason to invoke these hooks early against an mm that is in an
incomplete state.

The change in commit d24062914837 ("fork: use __mt_dup() to duplicate
maple tree in dup_mmap()") makes this more pertinent as we may be in a
state where entries in the maple tree are not yet consistent.

Their placement early in dup_mmap() only appears to have been meaningful
for early error checking, and since functionally it'd require a very small
allocation to fail (in practice 'too small to fail') that'd only occur in
the most dire circumstances, meaning the fork would fail or be OOM'd in
any case.

Since both khugepaged and KSM tracking are there to provide optimisations
to memory performance rather than critical functionality, it doesn't
really matter all that much if, under such dire memory pressure, we fail
to register an mm with these.

As a result, we follow the example of commit d2081b2bf819 ("mm:
khugepaged: make khugepaged_enter() void function") and make ksm_fork() a
void function also.

We only expose the mm to these functions once we are done with them and
only if no error occurred in the fork operation.

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2024-50263

CVSS Base Severity: LOW

CVSS Base Score: 0.0

Affected Products

Vendor: Linux

Product: Linux

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.04% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 5.06% (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/3b85aa0da8cd01173b9afd1f70080fbb9576c4b0
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/985da552a98e27096444508ce5d853244019111f
https://project-zero.issues.chromium.org/issues/373391951

Timeline