CVE-2022-49873: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bpf: Fix wrong reg type conversion in release_reference() Some helper functions will allocate memory. To avoid memory leaks, the verifier requires the eBPF program to release these memories by calling the corresponding helper functions. When a resource is released, all pointer registers corresponding to the resource should be invalidated. The verifier use release_references() to do this job, by apply __mark_reg_unknown() to each relevant register. It will give these registers the type of SCALAR_VALUE. A register that will contain a pointer value at runtime, but of type SCALAR_VALUE, which may allow the unprivileged user to get a kernel pointer by storing this register into a map. Using __mark_reg_not_init() while NOT allow_ptr_leaks can mitigate this problem.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 4.20, before 5.10.155 (fixed in 5.10.155); from 5.11, before 5.15.79 (fixed in 5.15.79); from 5.16, before 6.0.9 (fixed in 6.0.9); version 6.1 only

Published 2025-05-01. Last modified 2026-06-17.