In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net: batman-adv: fix error handling
Syzbot reported ODEBUG warning in batadv_nc_mesh_free(). The problem was in wrong error handling in batadv_mesh_init().
Before this patch batadv_mesh_init() was calling batadv_mesh_free() in case of any batadv_*_init() calls failure. This approach may work well, when there is some kind of indicator, which can tell which parts of batadv are initialized; but there isn't any.
All written above lead to cleaning up uninitialized fields. Even if we hide ODEBUG warning by initializing bat_priv->nc.work, syzbot was able to hit GPF in batadv_nc_purge_paths(), because hash pointer in still NULL. [1]
To fix these bugs we can unwind batadv_init() calls one by one. It is good approach for 2 reasons: 1) It fixes bugs on error handling path 2) It improves the performance, since we won't call unneeded batadv_free() functions.
So, this patch makes all batadv_init() clean up all allocated memory before returning with an error to no call correspoing batadv_free() and open-codes batadv_mesh_free() with proper order to avoid touching uninitialized fields.
Exploitability
AV:NAC:HPR:LUI:NScope
S:UImpact
C:NI:NA:H5.3/CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H