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In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: cxl/region: Avoid null pointer dereference in region lookup cxl_dpa_to_region() looks up a region based on a memdev and DPA. It wrongly assumes an endpoint found mapping the DPA is also of a fully assembled region. When not true it leads to a null pointer dereference looking up the region name. This appears during testing of region lookup after a failure to assemble a BIOS defined region or if the lookup raced with the assembly of the BIOS defined region. Failure to clean up BIOS defined regions that fail assembly is an issue in itself and a fix to that problem will alleviate some of the impact. It will not alleviate the race condition so let's harden this path. The behavior change is that the kernel oops due to a null pointer dereference is replaced with a dev_dbg() message noting that an endpoint was mapped. Additional comments are added so that future users of this function can more clearly understand what it provides.
CVSS 3.1 Base Score 5.5. CVSS Attack Vector: local. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).
While there are no complete fixes aside from conscientious programming, the following steps will go a long way to ensure that NULL pointer dereferences do not occur.
}
/* make use of pointer1 *//* ... */If you are working with a multithreaded or otherwise asynchronous environment, ensure that proper locking APIs are used to lock before the if statement; and unlock when it has finished.
This example takes an IP address from a user, verifies that it is well formed and then looks up the hostname and copies it into a buffer.
}
strcpy(hostname, hp->h_name);/*routine that ensures user_supplied_addr is in the right format for conversion */If an attacker provides an address that appears to be well-formed, but the address does not resolve to a hostname, then the call to gethostbyaddr() will return NULL. Since the code does not check the return value from gethostbyaddr (CWE-252), a NULL pointer dereference would then occur in the call to strcpy().
Note that this example is also vulnerable to a buffer overflow (see CWE-119).
In the following code, the programmer assumes that the system always has a property named "cmd" defined. If an attacker can control the program's environment so that "cmd" is not defined, the program throws a NULL pointer exception when it attempts to call the trim() method.
cmd = cmd.trim();This application has registered to handle a URL when sent an intent:
}......
}
}int length = URL.length();...The application assumes the URL will always be included in the intent. When the URL is not present, the call to getStringExtra() will return null, thus causing a null pointer exception when length() is called.
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