Description

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

mm: krealloc: Fix MTE false alarm in __do_krealloc

This patch addresses an issue introduced by commit 1a83a716ec233 ("mm:
krealloc: consider spare memory for __GFP_ZERO") which causes MTE
(Memory Tagging Extension) to falsely report a slab-out-of-bounds error.

The problem occurs when zeroing out spare memory in __do_krealloc. The
original code only considered software-based KASAN and did not account
for MTE. It does not reset the KASAN tag before calling memset, leading
to a mismatch between the pointer tag and the memory tag, resulting
in a false positive.

Example of the error:
==================================================================
swapper/0: BUG: KASAN: slab-out-of-bounds in __memset+0x84/0x188
swapper/0: Write at addr f4ffff8005f0fdf0 by task swapper/0/1
swapper/0: Pointer tag: [f4], memory tag: [fe]
swapper/0:
swapper/0: CPU: 4 UID: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 6.12.
swapper/0: Hardware name: MT6991(ENG) (DT)
swapper/0: Call trace:
swapper/0: dump_backtrace+0xfc/0x17c
swapper/0: show_stack+0x18/0x28
swapper/0: dump_stack_lvl+0x40/0xa0
swapper/0: print_report+0x1b8/0x71c
swapper/0: kasan_report+0xec/0x14c
swapper/0: __do_kernel_fault+0x60/0x29c
swapper/0: do_bad_area+0x30/0xdc
swapper/0: do_tag_check_fault+0x20/0x34
swapper/0: do_mem_abort+0x58/0x104
swapper/0: el1_abort+0x3c/0x5c
swapper/0: el1h_64_sync_handler+0x80/0xcc
swapper/0: el1h_64_sync+0x68/0x6c
swapper/0: ...

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2024-53097

CVSS Base Severity: MEDIUM

CVSS Base Score: 5.5

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/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: 0.03% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 7.81% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

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

References

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-53097
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8ebee7565effdeae6085458f8f8463363120a871
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d02492863023431c31f85d570f718433c22b9311
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d43f1430d47c22a0727c05b6f156ed25fecdfeb4
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/486aeb5f1855c75dd810c25036134961bd2a6722
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/71548fada7ee0eb50cc6ccda82dff010c745f92c
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3dfb40da84f26dd35dd9bbaf626a2424565b8406
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/704573851b51808b45dae2d62059d1d8189138a2

Timeline