CVE-2026-23352

Technical Description

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

x86/efi: defer freeing of boot services memory

efi_free_boot_services() frees memory occupied by EFI_BOOT_SERVICES_CODE

and EFI_BOOT_SERVICES_DATA using memblock_free_late().

There are two issue with that: memblock_free_late() should be used for

memory allocated with memblock_alloc() while the memory reserved with

memblock_reserve() should be freed with free_reserved_area().

More acutely, with CONFIG_DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT=y

efi_free_boot_services() is called before deferred initialization of the

memory map is complete.

Benjamin Herrenschmidt reports that this causes a leak of ~140MB of

RAM on EC2 t3a.nano instances which only have 512MB or RAM.

If the freed memory resides in the areas that memory map for them is

still uninitialized, they won't be actually freed because

memblock_free_late() calls memblock_free_pages() and the latter skips

uninitialized pages.

Using free_reserved_area() at this point is also p

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from linux. Update linux_kernel to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

Affected Products

References