CVE-2024-35956
Linux Kernel 5.9.5 – 6.1.120
Raw vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HCVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.
Summary
CVE-2024-35956 is a medium-severity Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime (CWE-401) vulnerability in Linux Linux Kernel. Its CVSS base score is 5.5 (Medium).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Endpoint Denial of Service (T1499); ranked at the 14th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to SA-11 (Developer Testing and Evaluation) and SA-15 (Development Process, Standards, and Tools) — see the control section below for these in your framework.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2024-35752
Vulnerability Data
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: btrfs: qgroup: fix qgroup prealloc rsv leak in subvolume operations Create subvolume, create snapshot and delete subvolume all use btrfs_subvolume_reserve_metadata() to reserve metadata for the changes done to the parent…
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subvolume's fs tree, which cannot be mediated in the normal way via start_transaction. When quota groups (squota or qgroups) are enabled, this reserves qgroup metadata of type PREALLOC. Once the operation is associated to a transaction, we convert PREALLOC to PERTRANS, which gets cleared in bulk at the end of the transaction. However, the error paths of these three operations were not implementing this lifecycle correctly. They unconditionally converted the PREALLOC to PERTRANS in a generic cleanup step regardless of errors or whether the operation was fully associated to a transaction or not. This resulted in error paths occasionally converting this rsv to PERTRANS without calling record_root_in_trans successfully, which meant that unless that root got recorded in the transaction by some other thread, the end of the transaction would not free that root's PERTRANS, leaking it. Ultimately, this resulted in hitting a WARN in CONFIG_BTRFS_DEBUG builds at unmount for the leaked reservation. The fix is to ensure that every qgroup PREALLOC reservation observes the following properties: 1. any failure before record_root_in_trans is called successfully results in freeing the PREALLOC reservation. 2. after record_root_in_trans, we convert to PERTRANS, and now the transaction owns freeing the reservation. This patch enforces those properties on the three operations. Without it, generic/269 with squotas enabled at mkfs time would fail in ~5-10 runs on my system. With this patch, it ran successfully 1000 times in a row.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI
Developer testing and evaluation (static analysis, fuzzing, or runtime leak detection) directly finds missing deallocation.
Requiring documented development standards and tools can mandate memory-management disciplines that avoid leaks at introduction.
Engineering principles applied during development can require explicit resource-release patterns that stop memory leaks from being coded.
Mitigating Controls (NIST CSF 2.0) AI
Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→CSF cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.
Secure SDLC practices directly enforce proper memory allocation/deallocation via coding standards, reviews, and tooling.
Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI
Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.
Security testing in development can detect unreleased memory, providing partial coverage of the weakness.
Secure development life cycle mandates memory-management practices that reduce missing-release defects.
Application security requirements can specify explicit memory-release rules, partially mitigating the weakness.
Secure system architecture and engineering principles include resource-management guidelines that address memory leaks.
Secure coding standards directly require proper allocation/deallocation, covering most of this weakness.
Capacity management may detect memory exhaustion symptoms but does not prevent the coding flaw.