arm bifrost CVE-2021-29256 vulnerability in Arm Products
Published on May 24, 2021

. The Arm Mali GPU kernel driver allows an unprivileged user to achieve access to freed memory, leading to information disclosure or root privilege escalation. This affects Bifrost r16p0 through r29p0 before r30p0, Valhall r19p0 through r29p0 before r30p0, and Midgard r28p0 through r30p0.

Vendor Advisory NVD

Known Exploited Vulnerability

This Arm Mali GPU Kernel Driver Use-After-Free Vulnerability is part of CISA's list of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities. Arm Mali GPU Kernel Driver contains a use-after-free vulnerability that may allow a non-privileged user to gain root privilege and/or disclose information.

The following remediation steps are recommended / required by July 28, 2023: Apply updates per vendor instructions or discontinue use of the product if updates are unavailable.

Vulnerability Analysis

CVE-2021-29256 is exploitable with network access, and requires small amount of user privileges. This vulnerability is considered to have a low attack complexity. It has an exploitability score of 2.8 out of four. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to be very high.

What is a Dangling pointer Vulnerability?

Referencing memory after it has been freed can cause a program to crash, use unexpected values, or execute code.

CVE-2021-29256 has been classified to as a Dangling pointer vulnerability or weakness.


Products Associated with CVE-2021-29256

You can be notified by stack.watch whenever vulnerabilities like CVE-2021-29256 are published in these products:

Arm Bifrost
 
Arm Midguard
 
Arm Valhall
 
Arm Midgard
 

What versions are vulnerable to CVE-2021-29256?