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CVE-2023-54007

Our Analysis: General-Purpose

Our model has classified this vulnerability as relevant to General-Purpose Systems, helping your team prioritize efforts effectively.

Published Date December 24, 2025
Last Modified December 29, 2025
CVSS Vector Not Available

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

vmci_host: fix a race condition in vmci_host_poll() causing GPF

During fuzzing, a general protection fault is observed in
vmci_host_poll().

general protection fault, probably for non-canonical address 0xdffffc0000000019: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP KASAN
KASAN: null-ptr-deref in range [0x00000000000000c8-0x00000000000000cf]
RIP: 0010:__lock_acquire+0xf3/0x5e00 kernel/locking/lockdep.c:4926
<- omitting registers ->
Call Trace:
<TASK>
lock_acquire+0x1a4/0x4a0 kernel/locking/lockdep.c:5672
__raw_spin_lock_irqsave include/linux/spinlock_api_smp.h:110 [inline]
_raw_spin_lock_irqsave+0xb3/0x100 kernel/locking/spinlock.c:162
add_wait_queue+0x3d/0x260 kernel/sched/wait.c:22
poll_wait include/linux/poll.h:49 [inline]
vmci_host_poll+0xf8/0x2b0 drivers/misc/vmw_vmci/vmci_host.c:174
vfs_poll include/linux/poll.h:88 [inline]
do_pollfd fs/select.c:873 [inline]
do_poll fs/select.c:921 [inline]
do_sys_poll+0xc7c/0x1aa0 fs/select.c:1015
__do_sys_ppoll fs/select.c:1121 [inline]
__se_sys_ppoll+0x2cc/0x330 fs/select.c:1101
do_syscall_x64 arch/x86/entry/common.c:51 [inline]
do_syscall_64+0x4e/0xa0 arch/x86/entry/common.c:82
entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x46/0xb0

Example thread interleaving that causes the general protection fault
is as follows:

CPU1 (vmci_host_poll) CPU2 (vmci_host_do_init_context)
----- -----
// Read uninitialized context
context = vmci_host_dev->context;
// Initialize context
vmci_host_dev->context = vmci_ctx_create();
vmci_host_dev->ct_type = VMCIOBJ_CONTEXT;

if (vmci_host_dev->ct_type == VMCIOBJ_CONTEXT) {
// Dereferencing the wrong pointer
poll_wait(..., &context->host_context);
}

In this scenario, vmci_host_poll() reads vmci_host_dev->context first,
and then reads vmci_host_dev->ct_type to check that
vmci_host_dev->context is initialized. However, since these two reads
are not atomically executed, there is a chance of a race condition as
described above.

To fix this race condition, read vmci_host_dev->context after checking
the value of vmci_host_dev->ct_type so that vmci_host_poll() always
reads an initialized context.