CVE-2022-49546

Summary

CVE-2022-49546 is a vulnerability affecting the Linux kernel's kexec component. A memory leak occurred due to an unreferenced elf header buffer in the crash_prepare_elf64_headers function. The buffer, allocated via vmalloc(), was not properly freed when the kdump kernel was reloaded or unloaded, leading to a memory leak. The issue was resolved by introducing the arch_kimage_file_post_load_cleanup() function and freeing the buffer there. Additionally, incorrect elf header buffer freeing code was removed before calling arch-specific kexec_file loading functions, as the image instance had already been initialized and 'image->elf_headers' should be NULL. This vulnerability was reported three times on x86_64 inside Redhat.

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