Cloud Vulnerability DB
An open project to list all known cloud vulnerabilities and Cloud Service Provider security issues
Vulnerability DatabaseCVE-2020-36778
CVE-2020-36778:
Linux Kernel vulnerability analysis and mitigation
Overview
CVE-2020-36778 affects the Linux kernel's i2c-xiic driver. The vulnerability was discovered when a reference leak was identified in the PM (Power Management) functionality when pmruntimeget_sync fails. This issue was reported by Hulk Robot and fixed by Qinglang Miao in December 2020 (Kernel Git).
Technical details
The vulnerability stems from an implementation flaw in the Linux kernel's i2c-xiic driver where the PM reference count would be incorrectly incremented even when pmruntimegetsync failed. This occurred in both xiicxfer and xiici2cremove functions. The missing corresponding 'put' operation resulted in a reference leak. The fix involved replacing pmruntimegetsync with pmruntimeresumeand_get to maintain proper usage counter balance (Kernel Git).
Impact
The reference leak in the PM functionality could lead to resource exhaustion over time, potentially affecting system stability and performance for systems using the affected i2c-xiic driver.
Mitigation and workarounds
The issue was fixed by replacing pmruntimegetsync with pmruntimeresumeand_get in the affected code paths. The fix was implemented in the Linux kernel through commit a85c5c7a3aa8041777ff691400b4046e56149fd3 and backported to various stable kernel versions (Kernel Git).
Additional resources
Source: This report was generated using AI
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