CVE-2026-23352

Published: Mar 25, 2026 Last Modified: Mar 25, 2026
ExploitDB:
Other exploit source:
Google Dorks:

Description

AI Translation Available

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

x86/efi: defer freeing of boot services memory

efi_free_boot_services() frees memory occupied by EFI_BOOT_SERVICES_CODE
and EFI_BOOT_SERVICES_DATA using memblock_free_late().

There are two issue with that: memblock_free_late() should be used for
memory allocated with memblock_alloc() while the memory reserved with
memblock_reserve() should be freed with free_reserved_area().

More acutely, with CONFIG_DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT=y
efi_free_boot_services() is called before deferred initialization of the
memory map is complete.

Benjamin Herrenschmidt reports that this causes a leak of ~140MB of
RAM on EC2 t3a.nano instances which only have 512MB or RAM.

If the freed memory resides in the areas that memory map for them is
still uninitialized, they won't be actually freed because
memblock_free_late() calls memblock_free_pages() and the latter skips
uninitialized pages.

Using free_reserved_area() at this point is also problematic because
__free_page() accesses the buddy of the freed page and that again might
end up in uninitialized part of the memory map.

Delaying the entire efi_free_boot_services() could be problematic
because in addition to freeing boot services memory it updates
efi.memmap without any synchronization and that's undesirable late in
boot when there is concurrency.

More robust approach is to only defer freeing of the EFI boot services
memory.

Split efi_free_boot_services() in two. First efi_unmap_boot_services()
collects ranges that should be freed into an array then
efi_free_boot_services() later frees them after deferred init is complete.

EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System)

Trend Analysis

EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System)

Prevede la probabilità di sfruttamento basata su intelligence sulle minacce e sulle caratteristiche della vulnerabilità.

EPSS Score
0,0002
Percentile
0,1th
Updated

Single Data Point

Only one EPSS measurement is available for this CVE. Trend analysis requires multiple data points over time.

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/227688312fece0026fc67a00ba9a0b3611ebe95d
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/399da820ecfe6f4f10c143e5c453d3559a04db9c
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4a2cb90c538f06c873a187aa743575d48685d7a6
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6a25e25279282c5c8ade554c04c6ab9dc7902c64
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7dcf59422a3b0d20ddda844f856b4a1e0608a326
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a4b0bf6a40f3c107c67a24fbc614510ef5719980
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f9e9cc320854a76a39e7bc92d144554f3a727fad