CVE-2022-49086

MEDIUM

Linux Kernel 4.3-5.17.3 - Use-After-Free in Open vSwitch

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: openvswitch: fix leak of nested actions While parsing user-provided actions, openvswitch module may dynamically allocate memory and store pointers in the internal copy of the actions. So this memory has to be freed while destroying the actions. Currently there are only two such actions: ct() and set(). However, there are many actions that can hold nested lists of actions and ovs_nla_free_flow_actions() just jumps over them leaking the memory. For example, removal of the flow with the following actions will lead to a leak of the memory allocated by nf_ct_tmpl_alloc(): actions:clone(ct(commit),0) Non-freed set() action may also leak the 'dst' structure for the tunnel info including device references. Under certain conditions with a high rate of flow rotation that may cause significant memory leak problem (2MB per second in reporter's case). The problem is also hard to mitigate, because the user doesn't have direct control over the datapath flows generated by OVS. Fix that by iterating over all the nested actions and freeing everything that needs to be freed recursively. New build time assertion should protect us from this problem if new actions will be added in the future. Unfortunately, openvswitch module doesn't use NLA_F_NESTED, so all attributes has to be explicitly checked. sample() and clone() actions are mixing extra attributes into the user-provided action list. That prevents some code generalization too.

Scores

CVSS v3 5.5
EPSS 0.0025
EPSS Percentile 16.5%
Attack Vector LOCAL
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Details

CWE
CWE-401
Status published
Products (24)
linux/Kernel 4.20.0 - 5.4.200linux
linux/Kernel 4.3.0 - 4.19.249linux
linux/Kernel 5.11.0 - 5.15.34linux
linux/Kernel 5.16.0 - 5.16.20linux
linux/Kernel 5.17.0 - 5.17.3linux
linux/Kernel 5.5.0 - 5.10.111linux
Linux/Linux < 4.3
Linux/Linux 34ae932a40369be6bd6ea97d66b6686361b4370d - 1f30fb9166d4f15a1aa19449b9da871fe0ed4796
Linux/Linux 34ae932a40369be6bd6ea97d66b6686361b4370d - 3554c214b83ec9a839ed574263a34218f372990c
Linux/Linux 34ae932a40369be6bd6ea97d66b6686361b4370d - 53bce9d19b0a9d245b25cd050b81652ed974a509
... and 14 more
Published Feb 26, 2025
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026