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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2022-49546 json

x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer

published 2025-02-26 20 mo ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2022-54686

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 20%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer

This is reported by kmemleak detector:

unreferenced object 0xffffc900002a9000 (size 4096): comm "kexec", pid 14950, jiffies 4295110793 (age 373.951s) hex dump (first 32 bytes): 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 .ELF............ 04 00 3e 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ..>............. backtrace: [<0000000016a8ef9f>] __vmalloc_node_range+0x101/0x170 [<000000002b66b6c0>] __vmalloc_node+0xb4/0x160 [<00000000ad40107d>] crash_prepare_elf64_headers+0x8e/0xcd0 [<0000000019afff23>] crash_load_segments+0x260/0x470 [<0000000019ebe95c>] bzImage64_load+0x814/0xad0 [<0000000093e16b05>] arch_kexec_kernel_image_load+0x1be/0x2a0 [<000000009ef2fc88>] kimage_file_alloc_init+0x2ec/0x5a0 [<0000000038f5a97a>] __do_sys_kexec_file_load+0x28d/0x530 [<0000000087c19992>] do_syscall_64+0x3b/0x90 [<0000000066e063a4>] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xae

In crash_prepare_elf64_headers(), a buffer is allocated via vmalloc() to store elf headers. While it's not freed back to system correctly when kdump kernel is reloaded or unloaded. Then memory leak is caused. Fix it by introducing x86 specific function arch_kimage_file_post_load_cleanup(), and freeing the buffer there.

And also remove the incorrect elf header buffer freeing code. Before calling arch specific kexec_file loading function, the image instance has been initialized. So 'image->elf_headers' must be NULL. It doesn't make sense to free the elf header buffer in the place.

Three different people have reported three bugs about the memory leak on x86_64 inside Redhat.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 5.10.236, 5.15.46, 5.17.14, 5.18.3, 5.19
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 5.18.5-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2022-49546

  • linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-47.51
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1019.23
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1017.23
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1015.18
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1013.15
  • linux-kvm Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1017.21
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1019.24
  • linux-gkeop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1002.4

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2022-49546

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • kernel-64kb SLES 15 SP3-LTSS, SLE High Performance Computing 15 SP3-LTSS, Enterprise Storage 7.1 5.3.18-150300.59.201.1
  • kernel-syms SLES for SAP 15 SP3, SLES 15 SP3-LTSS, SLE High Performance Computing 15 SP3-LTSS +1 more 5.3.18-150300.59.201.1
  • kernel-source SLES for SAP 15 SP3, SLES 15 SP3-LTSS, SLE High Performance Computing 15 SP3-LTSS +1 more 5.3.18-150300.59.201.1
  • kernel-default SLES for SAP 15 SP3, SLES 15 SP3-LTSS, SLE Micro 5.2 +5 more 5.3.18-150300.59.201.1
  • kernel-preempt SLES for SAP 15 SP3, SLES 15 SP3-LTSS, SLE High Performance Computing 15 SP3-LTSS +1 more 5.3.18-150300.59.201.1
  • kernel-obs-build SLES for SAP 15 SP3, SLES 15 SP3-LTSS, SLE High Performance Computing 15 SP3-LTSS +1 more 5.3.18-150300.59.201.1
  • kernel-default-base SLES for SAP 15 SP3, SLES 15 SP3-LTSS, SLE Micro 5.2 +3 more 5.3.18-150300.59.201.1.150300.18.120.1
  • kernel-64kb SLES 15 SP5-LTSS, SLE High Performance Computing 15 SP5-LTSS, SLE High Performance Computing 15 SP5-ESPOS 5.14.21-150500.55.100.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2026:0316-1SUSE-SU-2025:1293-1SUSE-SU-2025:1263-1SUSE-SU-2025:1241-1SUSE-SU-2025:1194-1SUSE-SU-2025:1183-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2022-49546 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: x86/kexec: fix memory leak of elf header buffer

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.28% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 20% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-401 Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime
Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.