In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: powerpc/mm/fault: Fix kfence page fault reporting copy_from_kernel_nofault() can be called when doing read of /proc/kcore. /proc/kcore can have some unmapped kfence objects which when read via copy_from_kernel_nofault() can cause page faults. Since *_nofault() functions define their own fixup table for handling fault, use that instead of asking kfence to handle such faults. Hence we search the exception tables for the nip which generated the fault. If there is an entry then we let the fixup table handler handle the page fault by returning an error from within ___do_page_fault(). This can be easily triggered if someone tries to do dd from /proc/kcore. eg. dd if=/proc/kcore of=/dev/null bs=1M Some example false negatives: =============================== BUG: KFENCE: invalid read in copy_from_kernel_nofault+0x9c/0x1a0 Invalid read at 0xc0000000fdff0000: copy_from_kernel_nofault+0x9c/0x1a0 0xc00000000665f950 read_kcore_iter+0x57c/0xa04 proc_reg_read_iter+0xe4/0x16c vfs_read+0x320/0x3ec ksys_read+0x90/0x154 system_call_exception+0x120/0x310 system_call_vectored_common+0x15c/0x2ec BUG: KFENCE: use-after-free read in copy_from_kernel_nofault+0x9c/0x1a0 Use-after-free read at 0xc0000000fe050000 (in kfence-#2): copy_from_kernel_nofault+0x9c/0x1a0 0xc00000000665f950 read_kcore_iter+0x57c/0xa04 proc_reg_read_iter+0xe4/0x16c vfs_read+0x320/0x3ec ksys_read+0x90/0x154 system_call_exception+0x120/0x310 system_call_vectored_common+0x15c/0x2ec
The product reuses or references memory after it has been freed. At some point afterward, the memory may be allocated again and saved in another pointer, while the original pointer references a location somewhere within the new allocation. Any operations using the original pointer are no longer valid because the memory "belongs" to the code that operates on the new pointer.