Memory Leak and System Lockup Vulnerability in Linux Kernel

CVE-2017-12190 · MEDIUM Severity

AV:L/AC:L/AU:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

The bio_map_user_iov and bio_unmap_user functions in block/bio.c in the Linux kernel before 4.13.8 do unbalanced refcounting when a SCSI I/O vector has small consecutive buffers belonging to the same page. The bio_add_pc_page function merges them into one, but the page reference is never dropped. This causes a memory leak and possible system lockup (exploitable against the host OS by a guest OS user, if a SCSI disk is passed through to a virtual machine) due to an out-of-memory condition.

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