References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

By selecting these links, you will be leaving NIST webspace. We have provided these links to other web sites because they may have information that would be of interest to you. No inferences should be drawn on account of other sites being referenced, or not, from this page. There may be other web sites that are more appropriate for your purpose. NIST does not necessarily endorse the views expressed, or concur with the facts presented on these sites. Further, NIST does not endorse any commercial products that may be mentioned on these sites. Please address comments about this page to [email protected].

Change History

A file descriptor can be closed while a thread is blocked in a poll(2) or select(2) call waiting for that descriptor.  Because the blocked thread does not hold a reference to the underlying object, this closure may result in the object being freed while the thread remains blocked.  In this situation, the kernel must remove the blocked thread from the per-object wait queue prior to freeing the object.

In the case of some file descriptor types, the kernel failed to unlink blocked threads from the object before freeing it.  When the blocked thread is subsequently woken, it accesses memory that has already been freed resulting in a use-after-free vulnerability.

The use-after-free vulnerability may be triggered by an unprivileged local user and can be exploited to obtain superuser privileges.

CWE-416

https://security.freebsd.org/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-26:19.file.asc