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CVE-2022-50257 Detail

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: xen/gntdev: Prevent leaking grants Prior to this commit, if a grant mapping operation failed partially, some of the entries in the map_ops array would be invalid, whereas all of the entries in the kmap_ops array would be valid. This in turn would cause the following logic in gntdev_map_grant_pages to become invalid: for (i = 0; i < map->count; i++) { if (map->map_ops[i].status == GNTST_okay) { map->unmap_ops[i].handle = map->map_ops[i].handle; if (!use_ptemod) alloced++; } if (use_ptemod) { if (map->kmap_ops[i].status == GNTST_okay) { if (map->map_ops[i].status == GNTST_okay) alloced++; map->kunmap_ops[i].handle = map->kmap_ops[i].handle; } } } ... atomic_add(alloced, &map->live_grants); Assume that use_ptemod is true (i.e., the domain mapping the granted pages is a paravirtualized domain). In the code excerpt above, note that the "alloced" variable is only incremented when both kmap_ops[i].status and map_ops[i].status are set to GNTST_okay (i.e., both mapping operations are successful). However, as also noted above, there are cases where a grant mapping operation fails partially, breaking the assumption of the code excerpt above. The aforementioned causes map->live_grants to be incorrectly set. In some cases, all of the map_ops mappings fail, but all of the kmap_ops mappings succeed, meaning that live_grants may remain zero. This in turn makes it impossible to unmap the successfully grant-mapped pages pointed to by kmap_ops, because unmap_grant_pages has the following snippet of code at its beginning: if (atomic_read(&map->live_grants) == 0) return; /* Nothing to do */ In other cases where only some of the map_ops mappings fail but all kmap_ops mappings succeed, live_grants is made positive, but when the user requests unmapping the grant-mapped pages, __unmap_grant_pages_done will then make map->live_grants negative, because the latter function does not check if all of the pages that were requested to be unmapped were actually unmapped, and the same function unconditionally subtracts "data->count" (i.e., a value that can be greater than map->live_grants) from map->live_grants. The side effects of a negative live_grants value have not been studied. The net effect of all of this is that grant references are leaked in one of the above conditions. In Qubes OS v4.1 (which uses Xen's grant mechanism extensively for X11 GUI isolation), this issue manifests itself with warning messages like the following to be printed out by the Linux kernel in the VM that had granted pages (that contain X11 GUI window data) to dom0: "g.e. 0x1234 still pending", especially after the user rapidly resizes GUI VM windows (causing some grant-mapping operations to partially or completely fail, due to the fact that the VM unshares some of the pages as part of the window resizing, making the pages impossible to grant-map from dom0). The fix for this issue involves counting all successful map_ops and kmap_ops mappings separately, and then adding the sum to live_grants. During unmapping, only the number of successfully unmapped grants is subtracted from live_grants. The code is also modified to check for negative live_grants values after the subtraction and warn the user.


Metrics

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CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
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NVD assessment not yet provided.

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URL Source(s) Tag(s)
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0991028cd49567d7016d1b224fe0117c35059f86 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0bccddd9b8f03ad57bb738f0d3da8845d4e1e579 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1cb73704cb4778299609634a790a80daba582f7d kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/273f6a4f71be12e2ec80a4919837d6e4fa933a04 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3d056d81b93a787613eda44aeb21fc14c3392b34 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/49bb053b1ec367b6883030eb2cca696e91435679 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/49db6cb81400ba863e1a85e55fcdf1031807c23f kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b043f2cab100bed3e0a999dcf38cc05b1e4a7e41 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/cb1ccfe7655380f77a58b340072f5f40bc285902 kernel.org

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source

Change History

1 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2022-50257
NVD Published Date:
09/15/2025
NVD Last Modified:
09/15/2025
Source:
kernel.org