CVE-2022-50675: arm64: mte: Avoid setting PG_mte_tagged if no tags cleared or restored

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2022-50675 is a medium (CVSS 5.8) vulnerability in linux. EPSS estimates a 0.24% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 15.3% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 09-12-2025
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 11-05-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: arm64: mte: Avoid setting PG_mte_tagged if no tags cleared or restored Prior to commit 69e3b846d8a7 ("arm64: mte: Sync tags for pages where PTE is untagged"), mte_sync_tags() was only called for pte_tagged() entries (those mapped with PROT_MTE). Therefore mte_sync_tags() could safely use test_and_set_bit(PG_mte_tagged, &page->flags) without inadvertently setting PG_mte_tagged on an untagged page. The above commit was required as guests may enable MTE without any control at the stage 2 mapping, nor a PROT_MTE mapping in the VMM. However, the side-effect was that any page with a PTE that looked like swap (or migration) was getting PG_mte_tagged set automatically. A subsequent page copy (e.g. migration) copied the tags to the destination page even if the tags were owned by KASAN. This issue was masked by the page_kasan_tag_reset() call introduced in commit e5b8d9218951 ("arm64: mte: reset the page tag in page->flags"). When this commit was reverted (20794545c146), KASAN started reporting access faults because the overriding tags in a page did not match the original page->flags (with CONFIG_KASAN_HW_TAGS=y): BUG: KASAN: invalid-access in copy_page+0x10/0xd0 arch/arm64/lib/copy_page.S:26 Read at addr f5ff000017f2e000 by task syz-executor.1/2218 Pointer tag: [f5], memory tag: [f2] Move the PG_mte_tagged bit setting from mte_sync_tags() to the actual place where tags are cleared (mte_sync_page_tags()) or restored (mte_restore_tags()).

No weakness data has been published for this record.