CVE-2022-48813 net: dsa: felix: don't use devres for mdiobus

What is CVE-2022-48813?

CVE-2022-48813 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 16 Jul 2024. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

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

net: dsa: felix: don't use devres for mdiobus

As explained in commits: 74b6d7d13307 ("net: dsa: realtek: register the MDIO bus under devres") 5135e96a3dd2 ("net: dsa: don't allocate the slave_mii_bus using devres")

mdiobus_free() will panic when called from devm_mdiobus_free() <- devres_release_all() <- __device_release_driver(), and that mdiobus was not previously unregistered.

The Felix VSC9959 switch is a PCI device, so the initial set of constraints that I thought would cause this (I2C or SPI buses which call ->remove on ->shutdown) do not apply. But there is one more which applies here.

If the DSA master itself is on a bus that calls ->remove from ->shutdown (like dpaa2-eth, which is on the fsl-mc bus), there is a device link between the switch and the DSA master, and device_links_unbind_consumers() will unbind the felix switch driver on shutdown.

So the same treatment must be applied to all DSA switch drivers, which is: either use devres for both the mdiobus allocation and registration, or don't use devres at all.

The felix driver has the code structure in place for orderly mdiobus removal, so just replace devm_mdiobus_alloc_size() with the non-devres variant, and add manual free where necessary, to ensure that we don't let devres free a still-registered bus.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-48813?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2022-48813?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Is CVE-2022-48813 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-48813 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

• CVE-2026-53266 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2013-6282 Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2022-0185 Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2013-2094 Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Exploited High 7.8

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2022-48813, GHSA-4wgh-6f55-v67r, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-48813.