CVE-2022-49568: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: KVM: Don't null dereference ops->destroy A KVM device cleanup happens in either of two callbacks: 1) destroy() which is called when the VM is being destroyed; 2) release() which is called when a device fd is closed. Most KVM devices use 1) but Book3s's interrupt controller KVM devices (XICS, XIVE, XIVE-native) use 2) as they need to close and reopen during the machine execution. The error handling in kvm_ioctl_create_device() assumes destroy() is always defined which leads to NULL dereference as discovered by Syzkaller. This adds a checks for destroy!=NULL and adds a missing release(). This is not changing kvm_destroy_devices() as devices with defined release() should have been removed from the KVM devices list by then.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: before 5.4.210 (fixed in 5.4.210); from 5.5, before 5.10.134 (fixed in 5.10.134); from 5.11, before 5.15.58 (fixed in 5.15.58); from 5.16, before 5.18.15 (fixed in 5.18.15); version 5.19 only

Published 2025-02-26. Last modified 2026-06-17.