CVE-2024-53223 clk: ralink: mtmips: fix clocks probe order in oldest ralink SoCs
A kernel driver bug causes a warning and potential instability during boot on specific Ralink SoCs, requiring a patch to fix clock probe order.
- 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-2024-53223?
CVE-2024-53223 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 27 Dec 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:
clk: ralink: mtmips: fix clocks probe order in oldest ralink SoCs
Base clocks are the first in being probed and are real dependencies of the rest of fixed, factor and peripheral clocks. For old ralink SoCs RT2880, RT305x and RT3883 'xtal' must be defined first since in any other case, when fixed clocks are probed they are delayed until 'xtal' is probed so the following warning appears:
WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 0 at drivers/clk/ralink/clk-mtmips.c:499 rt3883_bus_recalc_rate+0x98/0x138 Modules linked in: CPU: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper Not tainted 6.6.43 #0 Stack : 805e58d0 00000000 00000004 8004f950 00000000 00000004 00000000 00000000 80669c54 80830000 80700000 805ae570 80670068 00000001 80669bf8 00000000 00000000 00000000 805ae570 80669b38 00000020 804db7dc 00000000 00000000 203a6d6d 80669b78 80669e48 70617773 00000000 805ae570 00000000 00000009 00000000 00000001 00000004 00000001 00000000 00000000 83fe43b0 00000000 ... Call Trace: [<800065d0>] show_stack+0x64/0xf4 [<804bca14>] dump_stack_lvl+0x38/0x60 [<800218ac>] __warn+0x94/0xe4 [<8002195c>] warn_slowpath_fmt+0x60/0x94 [<80259ff8>] rt3883_bus_recalc_rate+0x98/0x138 [<80254530>] __clk_register+0x568/0x688 [<80254838>] of_clk_hw_register+0x18/0x2c [<8070b910>] rt2880_clk_of_clk_init_driver+0x18c/0x594 [<8070b628>] of_clk_init+0x1c0/0x23c [<806fc448>] plat_time_init+0x58/0x18c [<806fdaf0>] time_init+0x10/0x6c [<806f9bc4>] start_kernel+0x458/0x67c
---[ end trace 0000000000000000 ]---
When this driver was mainlined we could not find any active users of old ralink SoCs so we cannot perform any real tests for them. Now, one user of a Belkin f9k1109 version 1 device which uses RT3883 SoC appeared and reported some issues in openWRT: - https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/issues/16054
Thus, define a 'rt2880_xtal_recalc_rate()' just returning the expected frequency 40Mhz and use it along the old ralink SoCs to have a correct boot trace with no warnings and a working clock plan from the beggining.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-53223?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2024-53223?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2024-53223 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-53223 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2024-53223, DEBIAN-CVE-2024-53223, GHSA-5xv2-6m9r-98p7, UBUNTU-CVE-2024-53223.