CVE-2022-50263 vdpasim: fix memory leak when freeing IOTLBs

Medium 5.5 Published Updated

A memory leak in the Linux kernel vdpasim driver allows attackers to cause denial of service by exhausting system memory.

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-2022-50263?

CVE-2022-50263 is a medium-severity memory corruption vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 15 Sep 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:

vdpasim: fix memory leak when freeing IOTLBs

After commit bda324fd037a ("vdpasim: control virtqueue support"), vdpasim->iommu became an array of IOTLB, so we should clean the mappings of each free one by one instead of just deleting the ranges in the first IOTLB which may leak maps.

Weakness: CWE-401

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-50263?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2022-50263?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade to the fixed version. Memory-safe languages, compiler hardening and fuzzing prevent most new cases. More about Memory corruption.

Is CVE-2022-50263 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-50263 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2022-50263, GHSA-7mcf-2f6v-594w, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-50263.

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