Skip to content
Fencer Vulns
medium 4.7

CVE-2023-53614 json

mm/ksm: fix race with VMA iteration and mm_struct teardown

published 2025-10-04 13 mo ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2025-32268

cvss
4.7
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.1%
EPSS 0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 1%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

mm/ksm: fix race with VMA iteration and mm_struct teardown

exit_mmap() will tear down the VMAs and maple tree with the mmap_lock held in write mode. Ensure that the maple tree is still valid by checking ksm_test_exit() after taking the mmap_lock in read mode, but before the for_each_vma() iterator dereferences a destroyed maple tree.

Since the maple tree is destroyed, the flags telling lockdep to check an external lock has been cleared. Skip the for_each_vma() iterator to avoid dereferencing a maple tree without the external lock flag, which would create a lockdep warning.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.1.22, 6.2.9, 6.3
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 6.1.25-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2023-53614

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-2023-53614 updated cvss 7.0

kernel: mm/ksm: fix race with VMA iteration and mm_struct teardown

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “To mitigate the issue have to disable KSM. To verify whether KSM is enabled, run: sudo cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run If the command returns 0, KSM is disabled; if it returns 1, it is active.”
  • 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

0.11% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 1% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 4.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-362 Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization
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.