CVE-2022-50391 mm/mempolicy: fix memory leak in set_mempolicy_home_node system call

What is CVE-2022-50391?

CVE-2022-50391 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 18 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:

mm/mempolicy: fix memory leak in set_mempolicy_home_node system call

When encountering any vma in the range with policy other than MPOL_BIND or MPOL_PREFERRED_MANY, an error is returned without issuing a mpol_put on the policy just allocated with mpol_dup().

This allows arbitrary users to leak kernel memory.

Weakness: CWE-401

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-50391?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2022-50391?

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-2022-50391 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-50391 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-2022-50391, GHSA-m9c8-445c-mwfr, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-50391.