CVE-2022-49938 cifs: fix small mempool leak in SMB2_negotiate()
A memory leak in the Linux kernel's CIFS SMB2 negotiation allows attackers to cause a denial of service via resource exhaustion.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2022-49938?
CVE-2022-49938 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 18 Jun 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:
cifs: fix small mempool leak in SMB2_negotiate()
In some cases of failure (dialect mismatches) in SMB2_negotiate(), after the request is sent, the checks would return -EIO when they should be rather setting rc = -EIO and jumping to neg_exit to free the response buffer from mempool.
Weakness: CWE-401
Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-49938?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2022-49938?
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-2022-49938 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-49938 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2022-49938, GHSA-xr9r-hxj6-96p6, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-11-CVE-2022-49938, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-49938.