Cyber Resilience

CVE-2024-35956

Linux Kernel 5.9.5 – 6.1.120

Published
20 May 2024
Modified
03 November 2025
Patch / advisory
CVSS Score v3.1 5.5
Click a component to see what it means
Raw vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0023 14th percentile
Risk Priority 42 floored blend · peak EPSS

CVSS 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

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

T1499 Endpoint Denial of Service Impact
Adversaries may perform Endpoint Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to degrade or block the availability of services to users.
T1499.003 Application Exhaustion Flood Impact
Adversaries may target resource intensive features of applications to cause a denial of service (DoS), denying availability to those applications.
Derived from this CVE’s CWE(s) via the direct CWE→ATT&CK cross-walk.

CVEs Like This One

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CVE-2024-40942Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2026-31522Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2023-53602Same product: Linux Linux Kernel

Affected Assets

linux
linux kernel
6.9 · 5.9.5 — 6.1.120 · 6.2 — 6.6.28 · 6.7 — 6.8.7

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.

PR.PS-06 mostly match
prevents

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.

finds

Security testing in development can detect unreleased memory, providing partial coverage of the weakness.

prevents

Secure development life cycle mandates memory-management practices that reduce missing-release defects.

prevents

Application security requirements can specify explicit memory-release rules, partially mitigating the weakness.

prevents

Secure system architecture and engineering principles include resource-management guidelines that address memory leaks.

prevents

Secure coding standards directly require proper allocation/deallocation, covering most of this weakness.

finds

Capacity management may detect memory exhaustion symptoms but does not prevent the coding flaw.

References