CVE-2023-53171: 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: vfio/type1: prevent underflow of locked_vm via exec() When a vfio container is preserved across exec, the task does not change, but it gets a new mm with locked_vm=0, and loses the count from existing dma mappings. If the user later unmaps a dma mapping, locked_vm underflows to a large unsigned value, and a subsequent dma map request fails with ENOMEM in __account_locked_vm. To avoid underflow, grab and save the mm at the time a dma is mapped. Use that mm when adjusting locked_vm, rather than re-acquiring the saved task's mm, which may have changed. If the saved mm is dead, do nothing. locked_vm is incremented for existing mappings in a subsequent patch.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 3.6, before 5.10.173 (fixed in 5.10.173); from 5.11, before 5.15.99 (fixed in 5.15.99); from 5.16, before 6.1.16 (fixed in 6.1.16); from 6.2, before 6.2.3 (fixed in 6.2.3)

Published 2025-09-15. Last modified 2026-06-17.