CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-99164

HighCVSS 7.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.16%

5th percentile - higher than 5% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the SPI imx driver allocates DMA bounce buffers that are too small (kzalloc(dma_len) instead of DMA_CACHE_ALIGNED_LEN(dma_len)), while the DMA API operates on memory beyond the allocation end. This causes slab corruption, leading to refcount_t warnings and kernel oops. The issue is fixed by allocating and syncing buffers with the correct aligned length.

Risk Assessment

The vulnerability can cause system instability, kernel memory corruption, and crashes (oops) on i.MX platforms with active SPI DMA, potentially leading to denial of service or code execution.

Recommendation

Update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix (the correcting commit) or apply the appropriate patch for the spi-imx driver. Prioritize deployment on systems with i.MX8MP and heavy DMA load.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

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Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: spi: imx: fix slab corruption from undersized DMA bounce buffers Since commit faa8e404ad8e ("spi: imx: support dynamic burst length for ECSPI DMA mode"), the driver allocates its private DMA TX/RX buffers with kzalloc(dma_len), where dma_len is only rounded up to 4 bytes, but maps, syncs and unmaps them with DMA_CACHE_ALIGNED_LEN(dma_len), i.e. rounded up to the cache line size. As a result, the DMA API operates on memory beyond the end of the allocation. This was observed on a custom i.MX8MP platform with an mcp251xfd CAN controller under heavy RPMSG load, as a series of refcount_t warnings triggered from rpmsg_recv_done() in virtio_rpmsg_bus: refcount_t: addition on 0; use-after-free. refcount_t: underflow; use-after-free. refcount_t: saturated; leaking memory. Leading finally to an "Unable to handle kernel paging request" oops. Reproducing this problem took between 30 minutes and roughly 30 hours under the same workload. Hardware watchpoints on the refcount of a struct rpmsg_endpoint showed it was overwritten from 2 to 1 by __pi_memcpy_generic() in the irq/155-spi2.0 thread. Additionally it was found that a "normal" rpmsg_recv_done() took 11µs +/-2µs from its kref_get to kref_put. In the error case the same sequence took about 215µs +/-10µs. Based on this, an LLM was used to identify the size mismatch fixed here. Allocate the buffers with DMA_CACHE_ALIGNED_LEN(dma_len) so they cover the full mapped length, and use the same length for dma_sync_single_for_cpu() to stay consistent with map and unmap. With this patch applied, the same workload ran for more than 200 hours without the problem reproducing.

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