NULL pointer dereference in Linux

CVE-2024-39506

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: liquidio: Adjust a NULL pointer handling path in lio_vf_rep_copy_packet In lio_vf_rep_copy_packet() pg_info->page is compared to a NULL value, but then it is unconditionally passed to skb_add_rx_frag() which looks strange and could lead to null pointer dereference. lio_vf_rep_copy_packet() call trace looks like: octeon_droq_process_packets octeon_droq_fast_process_packets octeon_droq_dispatch_pkt octeon_create_recv_info ...search in the dispatch_list... ->disp_fn(rdisp->rinfo, ...) lio_vf_rep_pkt_recv(struct octeon_recv_info *recv_info, ...) In this path there is no code which sets pg_info->page to NULL. So this check looks unneeded and doesn't solve potential problem. But I guess the author had reason to add a check and I have no such card and can't do real test. In addition, the code in the function liquidio_push_packet() in liquidio/lio_core.c does exactly the same. Based on this, I consider the most acceptable compromise solution to adjust this issue by moving skb_add_rx_frag() into conditional scope. Found by Linux Verification Center (linuxtesting.org) with SVACE.

Published 2024-07-12 · last modified 2026-06-17.