In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ALSA: pcm: Fix potential AB/BA lock with buffer_mutex and mmap_lock syzbot caught a potential deadlock between the PCM runtime->buffer_mutex and the mm->mmap_lock. It was brought by the recent fix to cover the racy read/write and other ioctls, and in that commit, I overlooked a (hopefully only) corner case that may take the revert lock, namely, the OSS mmap. The OSS mmap operation exceptionally allows to re-configure the parameters inside the OSS mmap syscall, where mm->mmap_mutex is already held. Meanwhile, the copy_from/to_user calls at read/write operations also take the mm->mmap_lock internally, hence it may lead to a AB/BA deadlock. A similar problem was already seen in the past and we fixed it with a refcount (in commit b248371628aa). The former fix covered only the call paths with OSS read/write and OSS ioctls, while we need to cover the concurrent access via both ALSA and OSS APIs now. This patch addresses the problem above by replacing the buffer_mutex lock in the read/write operations with a refcount similar as we've used for OSS. The new field, runtime->buffer_accessing, keeps the number of concurrent read/write operations. Unlike the former buffer_mutex protection, this protects only around the copy_from/to_user() calls; the other codes are basically protected by the PCM stream lock. The refcount can be a negative, meaning blocked by the ioctls. If a negative value is seen, the read/write aborts with -EBUSY. In the ioctl side, OTOH, they check this refcount, too, and set to a negative value for blocking unless it's already being accessed.
Conclusion & alert: CVE-2022-49272 is rated Low Risk (23.4/100): CVSS Medium severity, with low exploitation likelihood (EPSS 0.02%). Mandatory action: Monitor for updates and reassess as exploit intelligence or EPSS changes.
Risk is dynamic; we continuously reassess and refresh what is shown on this page as upstream context changes.
EPSS lead: Daily EPSS estimates relative likelihood of exploitation; percentile ranks this CVE among scored vulnerabilities (higher = more severe relative rank).
| # | Date | Old EPSS score | New EPSS score | Delta (New - Old) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2025-09-23 | 0.05% | 0.02% | -0.03% |
| 2 | 2025-05-05 | 0.04% | 0.05% | +0.01% |
| 3 | 2025-02-27 | — | 0.04% | — |
Full EPSS history (3 records total)
CVSS metrics for this CVE.
| Base score | Version | Severity | Vector | Exploitability | Impact | Score source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.5 | 3.1 | MEDIUM |
|
1.8 | 3.6 | [email protected] |
| vendor | priority | summary | link |
|---|---|---|---|
debian
|
not yet assigned | CVE-2022-49272 not yet assigned priority: Debian including 1 source packages (linux), 5 status rows across 5 suites (bookworm, bullseye, forky, sid, trixie): resolved 5. | https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2022-49272 |
redhat
|
medium | — | https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2022-49272 |
suse
|
medium | — | https://www.suse.com/security/cve/CVE-2022-49272/ |
ubuntu
|
medium | CVE-2022-49272 medium priority: Ubuntu including 128 source packages (linux, linux-allwinner-5.19, …), 1024 status rows across 8 suites (bionic, focal, jammy, noble, oracular, trusty, upstream, xenial): DNE 702, ignored 146, not-affected 114, released 62. | https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2022-49272 |
| Vendor | Product | Version | Raw CPE |
|---|---|---|---|
| linux | linux_kernel | 5.10.109 | cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:5.10.109:*:*:*:*:*:*:* |
| linux | linux_kernel | 5.15.32 | cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:5.15.32:*:*:*:*:*:*:* |
| linux | linux_kernel | 5.16.18 | cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:5.16.18:*:*:*:*:*:*:* |
| linux | linux_kernel | 5.17.1 | cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:5.17.1:*:*:*:*:*:*:* |