CVE-2023-53698

low

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: xsk: fix refcount underflow in error path Fix a refcount underflow problem reported by syzbot that can happen when a system is running out of memory. If xp_alloc_tx_descs() fails, and it can only fail due to not having enough memory, then the error path is triggered. In this error path, the refcount of the pool is decremented as it has incremented before. However, the reference to the pool in the socket was not nulled. This means that when the socket is closed later, the socket teardown logic will think that there is a pool attached to the socket and try to decrease the refcount again, leading to a refcount underflow. I chose this fix as it involved adding just a single line. Another option would have been to move xp_get_pool() and the assignment of xs->pool to after the if-statement and using xs_umem->pool instead of xs->pool in the whole if-statement resulting in somewhat simpler code, but this would have led to much more churn in the code base perhaps making it harder to backport.

References

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/85c2c79a07302fe68a1ad5cc449458cc559e314d

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/789fcd94c9cac133dd4d96e193188661aca9f6c3

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3e7722c31d4167eb7f3ffd35aba52cab69b79072

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/15b453cf7348973217558235b9ece2ee5fea6777

Details

Source: Mitre, NVD

Published: 2025-10-22

Updated: 2025-10-22

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Base Score: 1

Vector: CVSS2#AV:L/AC:H/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:P

Severity: Low

CVSS v3

Base Score: 2.5

Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Severity: Low

EPSS

EPSS: 0.00018