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CVE-2024-40974

Medium

Elevated severity or exploit probability.

CVSS base
7.8 HIGH
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS — probability of exploitation (30 days)
0.3%
23.2th percentile
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness / dates
CWE-787
Published 2024-07-12 · modified 2026-08-04

CVSS breakdown

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Attack VectorLLocal
Attack ComplexityLLow
Privileges RequiredLLow
User InteractionNNone
ScopeUUnchanged
ConfidentialityHHigh
IntegrityHHigh
AvailabilityHHigh

Timeline

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: powerpc/pseries: Enforce hcall result buffer validity and size plpar_hcall(), plpar_hcall9(), and related functions expect callers to provide valid result buffers of certain minimum size. Currently this is communicated only through comments in the code and the compiler has no idea. For example, if I write a bug like this: long retbuf[PLPAR_HCALL_BUFSIZE]; // should be PLPAR_HCALL9_BUFSIZE plpar_hcall9(H_ALLOCATE_VAS_WINDOW, retbuf, ...); This compiles with no diagnostics emitted, but likely results in stack corruption at runtime when plpar_hcall9() stores results past the end of the array. (To be clear this is a contrived example and I have not found a real instance yet.) To make this class of error less likely, we can use explicitly-sized array parameters instead of pointers in the declarations for the hcall APIs. When compiled with -Warray-bounds[1], the code above now provokes a diagnostic like this: error: array argument is too small; is of size 32, callee requires at least 72 [-Werror,-Warray-bounds] 60 | plpar_hcall9(H_ALLOCATE_VAS_WINDOW, retbuf, | ^ ~~~~~~ [1] Enabled for LLVM builds but not GCC for now. See commit 0da6e5fd6c37 ("gcc: disable '-Warray-bounds' for gcc-13 too") and related changes.

Affected

linux

References

Official: NVD · CVE.org