CVE-2023-52811 scsi: ibmvfc: Remove BUG_ON in the case of an empty event pool

What is CVE-2023-52811?

CVE-2023-52811 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 21 May 2024. 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:

scsi: ibmvfc: Remove BUG_ON in the case of an empty event pool

In practice the driver should never send more commands than are allocated to a queue's event pool. In the unlikely event that this happens, the code asserts a BUG_ON, and in the case that the kernel is not configured to crash on panic returns a junk event pointer from the empty event list causing things to spiral from there. This BUG_ON is a historical artifact of the ibmvfc driver first being upstreamed, and it is well known now that the use of BUG_ON is bad practice except in the most unrecoverable scenario. There is nothing about this scenario that prevents the driver from recovering and carrying on.

Remove the BUG_ON in question from ibmvfc_get_event() and return a NULL pointer in the case of an empty event pool. Update all call sites to ibmvfc_get_event() to check for a NULL pointer and perfrom the appropriate failure or recovery action.

Weakness: CWE-476

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-52811?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2023-52811?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Is CVE-2023-52811 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-52811 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 BELL-CVE-2023-52811, DEBIAN-CVE-2023-52811, GHSA-j7xm-pf76-qww8, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-11-CVE-2023-52811, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-52811.