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Fencer Vulns
critical 9.8

CVE-2022-50335 in the critical feed json

9p: set req refcount to zero to avoid uninitialized usage

published 2025-09-15 13 mo ago modified 2026-08-05 3 mo ago also EUVD-2022-55520

cvss
9.8
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 32%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

9p: set req refcount to zero to avoid uninitialized usage

When a new request is allocated, the refcount will be zero if it is reused, but if the request is newly allocated from slab, it is not fully initialized before being added to idr.

If the p9_read_work got a response before the refcount initiated. It will use a uninitialized req, which will result in a bad request data struct.

Here is the logs from syzbot.

Corrupted memory at 0xffff88807eade00b [ 0xff 0x07 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 . . . . . . . . ] (in kfence-#110): p9_fcall_fini net/9p/client.c:248 [inline] p9_req_put net/9p/client.c:396 [inline] p9_req_put+0x208/0x250 net/9p/client.c:390 p9_client_walk+0x247/0x540 net/9p/client.c:1165 clone_fid fs/9p/fid.h:21 [inline] v9fs_fid_xattr_set+0xe4/0x2b0 fs/9p/xattr.c:118 v9fs_xattr_set fs/9p/xattr.c:100 [inline] v9fs_xattr_handler_set+0x6f/0x120 fs/9p/xattr.c:159 __vfs_setxattr+0x119/0x180 fs/xattr.c:182 __vfs_setxattr_noperm+0x129/0x5f0 fs/xattr.c:216 __vfs_setxattr_locked+0x1d3/0x260 fs/xattr.c:277 vfs_setxattr+0x143/0x340 fs/xattr.c:309 setxattr+0x146/0x160 fs/xattr.c:617 path_setxattr+0x197/0x1c0 fs/xattr.c:636 __do_sys_setxattr fs/xattr.c:652 [inline] __se_sys_setxattr fs/xattr.c:648 [inline] __ia32_sys_setxattr+0xc0/0x160 fs/xattr.c:648 do_syscall_32_irqs_on arch/x86/entry/common.c:112 [inline] __do_fast_syscall_32+0x65/0xf0 arch/x86/entry/common.c:178 do_fast_syscall_32+0x33/0x70 arch/x86/entry/common.c:203 entry_SYSENTER_compat_after_hwframe+0x70/0x82

Below is a similar scenario, the scenario in the syzbot log looks more complicated than this one, but this patch can fix it.

T21124 p9_read_work ======================== second trans ================================= p9_client_walk p9_client_rpc p9_client_prepare_req p9_tag_alloc req = kmem_cache_alloc(p9_req_cache, GFP_NOFS); tag = idr_alloc << preempted >> req->tc.tag = tag; /* req->[refcount/tag] == uninitialized */ m->rreq = p9_tag_lookup(m->client, m->rc.tag); /* increments uninitalized refcount */

refcount_set(&req->refcount, 2); /* cb drops one ref */ p9_client_cb(req) /* reader thread drops its ref: request is incorrectly freed */ p9_req_put(req) /* use after free and ref underflow */ p9_req_put(req)

To fix it, we can initialize the refcount to zero before add to idr.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 4.20, 5.15.86, 6.0.16, 6.1.2, 6.2
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 6.1.4-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2022-50335

  • linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-69.76
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1033.37
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1031.38
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1030.35
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1027.30
  • linux-kvm Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1030.35
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1035.42
  • linux-gkeop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1017.22

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2022-50335

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

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-2022-50335 updated cvss 7.0

kernel: 9p: set req refcount to zero to avoid uninitialized usage

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • 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

0.38% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 32% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
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-908 Use of Uninitialized Resource
Technology feeds

References

Sources

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