In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: perf sched: Fix register_pid() overflow, strcpy, and BUG_ON register_pid() has several issues when processing untrusted perf.data: 1

Overview

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

perf sched: Fix register_pid() overflow, strcpy, and BUG_ON

register_pid() has several issues when processing untrusted perf.data:

1. Integer overflow: (pid + 1) * sizeof(struct task_desc *) can wrap to a small value on 32-bit systems when pid is large (e.g. 0x40000000), causing realloc to return a tiny buffer followed by out-of-bounds writes in the initialization loop.

2. Heap buffer overflow: strcpy(task->comm, comm) copies the untrusted comm string into a fixed 20-byte COMM_LEN buffer with no length check.

3. BUG_ON on allocation failure: perf.data is untrusted input, so allocation failures should be handled gracefully rather than killing the process.

4. Realloc of sched->tasks assigned directly back, leaking the old pointer on failure; nr_tasks incremented before the realloc, leaving corrupted state on failure.

Cap pid at PID_MAX_LIMIT (4194304, matching the kernel's maximum on 64-bit), replace strcpy with strlcpy, guard against NULL comm, replace BUG_ON with NULL returns using safe realloc patterns, and add NULL checks in callers that dereference the result.

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.

Vendor advisories

• Red Hat VEX · Moderate · updated 2026-10-17 · vex