CVE-2023-52989 firewire: fix memory leak for payload of request subaction to IEC 61883-1 FCP region

What is CVE-2023-52989?

CVE-2023-52989 is a medium-severity memory corruption vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 27 Mar 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:

firewire: fix memory leak for payload of request subaction to IEC 61883-1 FCP region

This patch is fix for Linux kernel v2.6.33 or later.

For request subaction to IEC 61883-1 FCP region, Linux FireWire subsystem have had an issue of use-after-free. The subsystem allows multiple user space listeners to the region, while data of the payload was likely released before the listeners execute read(2) to access to it for copying to user space.

The issue was fixed by a commit 281e20323ab7 ("firewire: core: fix use-after-free regression in FCP handler"). The object of payload is duplicated in kernel space for each listener. When the listener executes ioctl(2) with FW_CDEV_IOC_SEND_RESPONSE request, the object is going to be released.

However, it causes memory leak since the commit relies on call of release_request() in drivers/firewire/core-cdev.c. Against the expectation, the function is never called due to the design of release_client_resource(). The function delegates release task to caller when called with non-NULL fourth argument. The implementation of ioctl_send_response() is the case. It should release the object explicitly.

This commit fixes the bug.

Weakness: CWE-401

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-52989?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2023-52989?

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-2023-52989 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-52989 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-2023-52989, DEBIAN-CVE-2023-52989, GHSA-x768-g2cv-hv4j, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-52989.