What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-50577: ima: Fix memory leak in __ima_inode_hash()

• Severity: unknown
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-10-22 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ima: Fix memory leak in __ima_inode_hash() Commit f3cc6b25dcc5 ("ima: always measure and audit files in policy") lets measurement or audit happen even if the file digest cannot be calculated. As a result, iint->ima_hash could have been allocated despite ima_collect_measurement() returning an error. Since ima_hash belongs to a temporary inode metadata structure, declared at the beginning of __ima_inode_hash(), just add a kfree() call if ima_collect_measurement() returns an error different from -ENOMEM (in that case, ima_hash should not have been allocated).

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 5.18 — fixed in 6.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8c1d6a050a0f16e0a9d32eaf53b965c77279c6f8
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c4df8cb38f139ed9f4296868c0a6f15a26e8c491
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f375bcf69f58fd0744c9dfd1b6b891a27301d67b

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