CVE-2024-38610: Linux Kernel

High severity, CVSS 7.8. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: drivers/virt/acrn: fix PFNMAP PTE checks in acrn_vm_ram_map() Patch series "mm: follow_pte() improvements and acrn follow_pte() fixes". Patch #1 fixes a bunch of issues I spotted in the acrn driver. It compiles, that's all I know. I'll appreciate some review and testing from acrn folks. Patch #2+#3 improve follow_pte(), passing a VMA instead of the MM, adding more sanity checks, and improving the documentation. Gave it a quick test on x86-64 using VM_PAT that ends up using follow_pte(). This patch (of 3): We currently miss handling various cases, resulting in a dangerous follow_pte() (previously follow_pfn()) usage. (1) We're not checking PTE write permissions. Maybe we should simply always require pte_write() like we do for pin_user_pages_fast(FOLL_WRITE)? Hard to tell, so let's check for ACRN_MEM_ACCESS_WRITE for now. (2) We're not rejecting refcounted pages. As we are not using MMU notifiers, messing with refcounted pages is dangerous and can result in use-after-free. Let's make sure to reject them. (3) We are only looking at the first PTE of a bigger range. We only lookup a single PTE, but memmap->len may span a larger area. Let's loop over all involved PTEs and make sure the PFN range is actually contiguous. Reject everything else: it couldn't have worked either way, and rather made use access PFNs we shouldn't be accessing.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 5.15.33, before 5.15.161 (fixed in 5.15.161); from 5.16.19, before 5.17 (fixed in 5.17); from 5.17.2, before 6.1.93 (fixed in 6.1.93); from 6.2, before 6.6.33 (fixed in 6.6.33); from 6.7, before 6.8.12 (fixed in 6.8.12); from 6.9, before 6.9.3 (fixed in 6.9.3)

Published 2024-06-19. Last modified 2026-08-04.