CVE-2022-50765 RISC-V: kexec: Fix memory leak of elf header buffer
A memory leak in the Linux kernel's RISC-V kexec implementation allows local attackers to exhaust system memory, causing denial of service.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- An administrator
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2022-50765?
CVE-2022-50765 is a memory corruption vulnerability in Linux, published on 24 Dec 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:
RISC-V: kexec: Fix memory leak of elf header buffer
This is reported by kmemleak detector:
unreferenced object 0xff2000000403d000 (size 4096): comm "kexec", pid 146, jiffies 4294900633 (age 64.792s) hex dump (first 32 bytes): 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 .ELF............ 04 00 f3 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ backtrace: [<00000000566ca97c>] kmemleak_vmalloc+0x3c/0xbe [<00000000979283d8>] __vmalloc_node_range+0x3ac/0x560 [<00000000b4b3712a>] __vmalloc_node+0x56/0x62 [<00000000854f75e2>] vzalloc+0x2c/0x34 [<00000000e9a00db9>] crash_prepare_elf64_headers+0x80/0x30c [<0000000067e8bf48>] elf_kexec_load+0x3e8/0x4ec [<0000000036548e09>] kexec_image_load_default+0x40/0x4c [<0000000079fbe1b4>] sys_kexec_file_load+0x1c4/0x322 [<0000000040c62c03>] ret_from_syscall+0x0/0x2
In elf_kexec_load(), a buffer is allocated via vzalloc() to store elf headers. While it's not freed back to system when kdump kernel is reloaded or unloaded, or when image->elf_header is successfully set and then fails to load kdump kernel for some reason. Fix it by freeing the buffer in arch_kimage_file_post_load_cleanup().
Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-50765?
How do I fix CVE-2022-50765?
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-2022-50765 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-50765 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2022-50765, GHSA-9rwv-33pv-xm7g, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-50765.