CVE-2022-50745: 
Linux Kernel vulnerability analysis and mitigation

CVE-2022-50745 is a use-after-free vulnerability in the Linux kernel's staging media driver for NVIDIA Tegra video (tegra-video). The flaw exists in the tegra_csi_channels_alloc function, where a pointer to a device tree (OF) node is saved in chan->of_node after the node's reference count has already been decremented to zero, allowing the node to be freed before it is used in tegra_csi_channel_init. It affects the Linux kernel across multiple stable branches, with fixes backported to versions 5.10.163, 5.15.87, 6.0.18, 6.1.4, and 6.2. The vulnerability was published on December 24, 2025, and carries an estimated CVSS severity of Medium (Feedly, EUVD).

The root cause is a use-after-free (CWE-416) in the staging/media/tegra-video driver. During device probe, for_each_child_of_node() iterates over OF child nodes and automatically increments and decrements the reference count for each node; however, tegra_csi_channel_alloc() saves a raw pointer to the node in chan->of_node without calling of_node_get() to hold an additional reference. By the time tegra_csi_channels_init() subsequently accesses chan->of_node, the node's reference count may have reached zero and the memory could have been freed or reused. The fix adds an explicit of_node_get() call when saving the pointer and a corresponding of_node_put() during teardown (Feedly, EUVD). Exploitation would require local access to a system with the affected Tegra CSI driver loaded.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could result in kernel memory corruption due to access of freed memory, potentially leading to a system crash (denial of service) or, in more complex scenarios, privilege escalation if an attacker can control the freed memory region. The affected component is limited to systems running NVIDIA Tegra hardware with the staging/media/tegra-video kernel driver active, which narrows the scope primarily to embedded and ARM-based platforms using Tegra SoCs. Data confidentiality and integrity impacts are theoretically possible if the freed memory is reclaimed and manipulated, but practical exploitation to achieve code execution would be highly complex (Feedly, EUVD).

The Linux kernel maintainers have released patches across multiple stable branches. Users should update to the following fixed versions or later: 5.10.163, 5.15.87, 6.0.18, 6.1.4, or 6.2 (Feedly, EUVD). SUSE has also issued kernel security updates addressing this CVE (SUSE-2026-0263, SUSE-2026-0317, SUSE-2026-0411). As a workaround on systems where the Tegra CSI driver is not required, the tegra-video staging module can be blacklisted to prevent loading. Applying the vendor-supplied kernel update is the recommended remediation.