CVE-2023-53453 drm/radeon: free iio for atombios when driver shutdown
A memory leak in the Radeon DRM driver during shutdown can lead to resource exhaustion and denial of service.
- 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-2023-53453?
CVE-2023-53453 is a medium-severity memory corruption vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 1 Oct 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:
drm/radeon: free iio for atombios when driver shutdown
Fix below kmemleak when unload radeon driver:
unreferenced object 0xffff9f8608ede200 (size 512): comm "systemd-udevd", pid 326, jiffies 4294682822 (age 716.338s) hex dump (first 32 bytes): 00 00 00 00 c4 aa ec aa 14 ab 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ backtrace: [<0000000062fadebe>] kmem_cache_alloc_trace+0x2f1/0x500 [<00000000b6883cea>] atom_parse+0x117/0x230 [radeon] [<00000000158c23fd>] radeon_atombios_init+0xab/0x170 [radeon] [<00000000683f672e>] si_init+0x57/0x750 [radeon] [<00000000566cc31f>] radeon_device_init+0x559/0x9c0 [radeon] [<0000000046efabb3>] radeon_driver_load_kms+0xc1/0x1a0 [radeon] [<00000000b5155064>] drm_dev_register+0xdd/0x1d0 [<0000000045fec835>] radeon_pci_probe+0xbd/0x100 [radeon] [<00000000e69ecca3>] pci_device_probe+0xe1/0x160 [<0000000019484b76>] really_probe.part.0+0xc1/0x2c0 [<000000003f2649da>] __driver_probe_device+0x96/0x130 [<00000000231c5bb1>] driver_probe_device+0x24/0xf0 [<0000000000a42377>] __driver_attach+0x77/0x190 [<00000000d7574da6>] bus_for_each_dev+0x7f/0xd0 [<00000000633166d2>] driver_attach+0x1e/0x30 [<00000000313b05b8>] bus_add_driver+0x12c/0x1e0
iio was allocated in atom_index_iio() called by atom_parse(), but it doesn't got released when the dirver is shutdown. Fix this kmemleak by free it in radeon_atombios_fini().
Weakness: CWE-401
Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-53453?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2023-53453?
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-2023-53453 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-53453 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2023-53453, DEBIAN-CVE-2023-53453, GHSA-gpfm-3cf9-qphw, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-53453.