CVE-2023-53696 scsi: qla2xxx: Fix memory leak in qla2x00_probe_one()
A memory leak in the qla2xxx SCSI driver allows local attackers to cause denial of service by exhausting kernel memory during adapter initialization failures.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2023-53696?
CVE-2023-53696 is a memory corruption vulnerability in Linux, published on 22 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:
scsi: qla2xxx: Fix memory leak in qla2x00_probe_one()
There is a memory leak reported by kmemleak:
unreferenced object 0xffffc900003f0000 (size 12288): comm "modprobe", pid 19117, jiffies 4299751452 (age 42490.264s) hex dump (first 32 bytes): 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ backtrace: [<00000000629261a8>] __vmalloc_node_range+0xe56/0x1110 [<0000000001906886>] __vmalloc_node+0xbd/0x150 [<000000005bb4dc34>] vmalloc+0x25/0x30 [<00000000a2dc1194>] qla2x00_create_host+0x7a0/0xe30 [qla2xxx] [<0000000062b14b47>] qla2x00_probe_one+0x2eb8/0xd160 [qla2xxx] [<00000000641ccc04>] local_pci_probe+0xeb/0x1a0
The root cause is traced to an error-handling path in qla2x00_probe_one() when the adapter "base_vha" initialize failed. The fab_scan_rp "scan.l" is used to record the port information and it is allocated in qla2x00_create_host(). However, it is not released in the error handling path "probe_failed".
Fix this by freeing the memory of "scan.l" when an error occurs in the adapter initialization process.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-53696?
How do I fix CVE-2023-53696?
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-2023-53696 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-53696 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2023-53696, DEBIAN-CVE-2023-53696, GHSA-hh3x-pv67-6v62, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-11-CVE-2023-53696, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-53696.