CVE Catalog

CVE-2024-40974

HighCVSS 7.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.30%

23th percentile - higher than 23% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the Linux kernel for powerpc/pseries, plpar_hcall() and related functions did not enforce proper result buffer sizes, potentially leading to stack corruption. The fix changes declarations to explicitly-sized arrays, enabling compiler detection of such errors.

Risk Assessment

May lead to stack memory corruption and system crashes on Power servers.

Recommendation

Install the kernel update containing this fix to prevent potential memory corruption.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: powerpc/pseries: Enforce hcall result buffer validity and size plpar_hcall(), plpar_hcall9(), and related functions expect callers to provide valid result buffers of certain minimum size. Currently this is communicated only through comments in the code and the compiler has no idea. For example, if I write a bug like this: long retbuf[PLPAR_HCALL_BUFSIZE]; // should be PLPAR_HCALL9_BUFSIZE plpar_hcall9(H_ALLOCATE_VAS_WINDOW, retbuf, ...); This compiles with no diagnostics emitted, but likely results in stack corruption at runtime when plpar_hcall9() stores results past the end of the array. (To be clear this is a contrived example and I have not found a real instance yet.) To make this class of error less likely, we can use explicitly-sized array parameters instead of pointers in the declarations for the hcall APIs. When compiled with -Warray-bounds[1], the code above now provokes a diagnostic like this: error: array argument is too small; is of size 32, callee requires at least 72 [-Werror,-Warray-bounds] 60 | plpar_hcall9(H_ALLOCATE_VAS_WINDOW, retbuf, | ^ ~~~~~~ [1] Enabled for LLVM builds but not GCC for now. See commit 0da6e5fd6c37 ("gcc: disable '-Warray-bounds' for gcc-13 too") and related changes.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS