CVE-2021-47131 - CVE House
Back to Database
Status published High CVE-2021-47131

net/tls: Fix use-after-free after the TLS device goes down and up

Vulnerability Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net/tls: Fix use-after-free after the TLS device goes down and up When a netdev with active TLS offload goes down, tls_device_down is called to stop the offload and tear down the TLS context. However, the socket stays alive, and it still points to the TLS context, which is now deallocated. If a netdev goes up, while the connection is still active, and the data flow resumes after a number of TCP retransmissions, it will lead to a use-after-free of the TLS context. This commit addresses this bug by keeping the context alive until its normal destruction, and implements the necessary fallbacks, so that the connection can resume in software (non-offloaded) kTLS mode. On the TX side tls_sw_fallback is used to encrypt all packets. The RX side already has all the necessary fallbacks, because receiving non-decrypted packets is supported. The thing needed on the RX side is to block resync requests, which are normally produced after receiving non-decrypted packets. The necessary synchronization is implemented for a graceful teardown: first the fallbacks are deployed, then the driver resources are released (it used to be possible to have a tls_dev_resync after tls_dev_del). A new flag called TLS_RX_DEV_DEGRADED is added to indicate the fallback mode. It's used to skip the RX resync logic completely, as it becomes useless, and some objects may be released (for example, resync_async, which is allocated and freed by the driver).

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

THREAT MONITOR

Am I Vulnerable?

Launch our assessment wizard to check if your infrastructure is exposed to • CVE-2021-47131

Credits & Attribution

No credits recorded in the NVD database.

Affected Vendor

Affected Software

Linux
Vulnerable Versions:
e8f69799810c32dd40c6724d829eccc70baad07f, 4.18, 0, 5.10.43, 5.12.10, 5.13

Timeline

Official Publish: March 15th, 2024
Last Modified: May 11th, 2026
Added to House: July 21st, 2026

CVSS Vectors

V3: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Weaknesses (CWE)

No CWE data available

MITRE ATT&CK TTPs

No associated TTPs found for this vulnerability.