CVE-2022-49782 perf: Improve missing SIGTRAP checking

What is CVE-2022-49782?

CVE-2022-49782 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 1 May 2025. 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:

perf: Improve missing SIGTRAP checking

To catch missing SIGTRAP we employ a WARN in __perf_event_overflow(), which fires if pending_sigtrap was already set: returning to user space without consuming pending_sigtrap, and then having the event fire again would re-enter the kernel and trigger the WARN.

This, however, seemed to miss the case where some events not associated with progress in the user space task can fire and the interrupt handler runs before the IRQ work meant to consume pending_sigtrap (and generate the SIGTRAP).

syzbot gifted us this stack trace:

| WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 3607 at kernel/events/core.c:9313 __perf_event_overflow | Modules linked in: | CPU: 0 PID: 3607 Comm: syz-executor100 Not tainted 6.1.0-rc2-syzkaller-00073-g88619e77b33d #0 | Hardware name: Google Google Compute Engine/Google Compute Engine, BIOS Google 10/11/2022 | RIP: 0010:__perf_event_overflow+0x498/0x540 kernel/events/core.c:9313 | <...> | Call Trace: | <TASK> | perf_swevent_hrtimer+0x34f/0x3c0 kernel/events/core.c:10729 | __run_hrtimer kernel/time/hrtimer.c:1685 [inline] | __hrtimer_run_queues+0x1c6/0xfb0 kernel/time/hrtimer.c:1749 | hrtimer_interrupt+0x31c/0x790 kernel/time/hrtimer.c:1811 | local_apic_timer_interrupt arch/x86/kernel/apic/apic.c:1096 [inline] | __sysvec_apic_timer_interrupt+0x17c/0x640 arch/x86/kernel/apic/apic.c:1113 | sysvec_apic_timer_interrupt+0x40/0xc0 arch/x86/kernel/apic/apic.c:1107 | asm_sysvec_apic_timer_interrupt+0x16/0x20 arch/x86/include/asm/idtentry.h:649 | <...> | </TASK>

In this case, syzbot produced a program with event type PERF_TYPE_SOFTWARE and config PERF_COUNT_SW_CPU_CLOCK. The hrtimer manages to fire again before the IRQ work got a chance to run, all while never having returned to user space.

Improve the WARN to check for real progress in user space: approximate this by storing a 32-bit hash of the current IP into pending_sigtrap, and if an event fires while pending_sigtrap still matches the previous IP, we assume no progress (false negatives are possible given we could return to user space and trigger again on the same IP).

Weakness: CWE-674

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-49782?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2022-49782?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2022-49782 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-49782 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-2022-49782, GHSA-h557-5h69-jf25, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-49782.