linux-cve-announce - CVE-2022-50765: RISC-V: kexec: Fix memory leak of elf header buffer

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Message-ID: <2025122456-CVE-2022-50765-356e@gregkh>
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2025 14:06:16 +0100
From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
To: linux-cve-announce@...r.kernel.org
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...nel.org>
Subject: CVE-2022-50765: RISC-V: kexec: Fix memory leak of elf header buffer

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...nel.org>

Description
===========

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

RISC-V: kexec: Fix memory leak of elf header buffer

This is reported by kmemleak detector:

unreferenced object 0xff2000000403d000 (size 4096):
  comm "kexec", pid 146, jiffies 4294900633 (age 64.792s)
  hex dump (first 32 bytes):
    7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  .ELF............
    04 00 f3 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
  backtrace:
    [<00000000566ca97c>] kmemleak_vmalloc+0x3c/0xbe
    [<00000000979283d8>] __vmalloc_node_range+0x3ac/0x560
    [<00000000b4b3712a>] __vmalloc_node+0x56/0x62
    [<00000000854f75e2>] vzalloc+0x2c/0x34
    [<00000000e9a00db9>] crash_prepare_elf64_headers+0x80/0x30c
    [<0000000067e8bf48>] elf_kexec_load+0x3e8/0x4ec
    [<0000000036548e09>] kexec_image_load_default+0x40/0x4c
    [<0000000079fbe1b4>] sys_kexec_file_load+0x1c4/0x322
    [<0000000040c62c03>] ret_from_syscall+0x0/0x2

In elf_kexec_load(), a buffer is allocated via vzalloc() to store elf
headers.  While it's not freed back to system when kdump kernel is
reloaded or unloaded, or when image->elf_header is successfully set and
then fails to load kdump kernel for some reason. Fix it by freeing the
buffer in arch_kimage_file_post_load_cleanup().

The Linux kernel CVE team has assigned CVE-2022-50765 to this issue.


Affected and fixed versions
===========================

	Issue introduced in 5.19 with commit 8acea455fafaf2620b247de6c00774828b618a82 and fixed in 6.0.18 with commit 090bfcfc9f14d05154893c67eeaecc56e894fbae
	Issue introduced in 5.19 with commit 8acea455fafaf2620b247de6c00774828b618a82 and fixed in 6.1.4 with commit cdea2da6787583ecca43594132533a2ac8d7cd21
	Issue introduced in 5.19 with commit 8acea455fafaf2620b247de6c00774828b618a82 and fixed in 6.2 with commit cbc32023ddbdf4baa3d9dc513a2184a84080a5a2

Please see https://www.kernel.org for a full list of currently supported
kernel versions by the kernel community.

Unaffected versions might change over time as fixes are backported to
older supported kernel versions.  The official CVE entry at
	https://cve.org/CVERecord/?id=CVE-2022-50765
will be updated if fixes are backported, please check that for the most
up to date information about this issue.


Affected files
==============

The file(s) affected by this issue are:
	arch/riscv/kernel/elf_kexec.c


Mitigation
==========

The Linux kernel CVE team recommends that you update to the latest
stable kernel version for this, and many other bugfixes.  Individual
changes are never tested alone, but rather are part of a larger kernel
release.  Cherry-picking individual commits is not recommended or
supported by the Linux kernel community at all.  If however, updating to
the latest release is impossible, the individual changes to resolve this
issue can be found at these commits:
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/090bfcfc9f14d05154893c67eeaecc56e894fbae
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/cdea2da6787583ecca43594132533a2ac8d7cd21
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/cbc32023ddbdf4baa3d9dc513a2184a84080a5a2