What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-54041: io_uring: fix memory leak when removing provided buffers

• 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: 2025-12-24 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: io_uring: fix memory leak when removing provided buffers When removing provided buffers, io_buffer structs are not being disposed of, leading to a memory leak. They can't be freed individually, because they are allocated in page-sized groups. They need to be added to some free list instead, such as io_buffers_cache. All callers already hold the lock protecting it, apart from when destroying buffers, so had to extend the lock there.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 5.18 — fixed in 6.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ac48787f58d1068f4e06d627c1135784d64b4c72
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b4a72c0589fdea6259720375426179888969d6a2
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c117c15927772d1624c29c092b6bd3f47c7faa48

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