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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2024-26998 json

serial: core: Clearing the circular buffer before NULLifying it

published 2024-05-01 2 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2024-24260

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 13%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

serial: core: Clearing the circular buffer before NULLifying it

The circular buffer is NULLified in uart_tty_port_shutdown() under the spin lock. However, the PM or other timer based callbacks may still trigger after this event without knowning that buffer pointer is not valid. Since the serial code is a bit inconsistent in checking the buffer state (some rely on the head-tail positions, some on the buffer pointer), it's better to have both aligned, i.e. buffer pointer to be NULL and head-tail possitions to be the same, meaning it's empty. This will prevent asynchronous calls to dereference NULL pointer as reported recently in 8250 case:

BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 00000cf5 Workqueue: pm pm_runtime_work EIP: serial8250_tx_chars (drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250_port.c:1809) ... ? serial8250_tx_chars (drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250_port.c:1809) __start_tx (drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250_port.c:1551) serial8250_start_tx (drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250_port.c:1654) serial_port_runtime_suspend (include/linux/serial_core.h:667 drivers/tty/serial/serial_port.c:63) __rpm_callback (drivers/base/power/runtime.c:393) ? serial_port_remove (drivers/tty/serial/serial_port.c:50) rpm_suspend (drivers/base/power/runtime.c:447)

The proposed change will prevent ->start_tx() to be called during suspend on shut down port.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.6.29, 6.8, 6.8.8, 6.9
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13 6.8.9-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2024-26998

  • linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-38.38
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1011.12
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1010.11
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1006.9
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1008.8
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1010.10
  • linux-intel Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1007.14
  • linux-raspi Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1007.7

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2024-26998

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-2024-26998 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: serial: core: Clearing the circular buffer before NULLifying it

  • 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
    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
partial
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

0.23% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 13% 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
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.