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Fencer Vulns
high 7.8

CVE-2023-53790 json

bpf: Zeroing allocated object from slab in bpf memory allocator

published 2025-12-09 11 mo ago modified 2026-10-15 24 d ago also EUVD-2023-60116

cvss
7.8
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 4%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

bpf: Zeroing allocated object from slab in bpf memory allocator

Currently the freed element in bpf memory allocator may be immediately reused, for htab map the reuse will reinitialize special fields in map value (e.g., bpf_spin_lock), but lookup procedure may still access these special fields, and it may lead to hard-lockup as shown below:

NMI backtrace for cpu 16 CPU: 16 PID: 2574 Comm: htab.bin Tainted: G L 6.1.0+ #1 Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996), RIP: 0010:queued_spin_lock_slowpath+0x283/0x2c0 ...... Call Trace: <TASK> copy_map_value_locked+0xb7/0x170 bpf_map_copy_value+0x113/0x3c0 __sys_bpf+0x1c67/0x2780 __x64_sys_bpf+0x1c/0x20 do_syscall_64+0x30/0x60 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x46/0xb0 ...... </TASK>

For htab map, just like the preallocated case, these is no need to initialize these special fields in map value again once these fields have been initialized. For preallocated htab map, these fields are initialized through __GFP_ZERO in bpf_map_area_alloc(), so do the similar thing for non-preallocated htab in bpf memory allocator. And there is no need to use __GFP_ZERO for per-cpu bpf memory allocator, because __alloc_percpu_gfp() does it implicitly.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.1.16, 6.2.3, 6.3
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 6.1.20-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2023-53790

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-2023-53790 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: bpf: Zeroing allocated object from slab in bpf memory allocator

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more
    affected: workaround, no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • 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 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

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
total
Assessed
24 d ago

Exploit prediction

0.15% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 4% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

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.