CVE-2026-99039 in Linux
Summary
by MITRE • 10/23/2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
memstick: core: wait for request completion before freeing card
In memstick_alloc_card() and memstick_set_rw_addr(), wait_for_completion_timeout() is used to wait for device identification and address configuration requests to complete.
The memstick subsystem does not provide an abort or cancellation callback in struct memstick_host for in-flight requests. If wait_for_completion_timeout() expires (for instance, when a USB transfer or command retry is delayed), memstick_alloc_card() returns an error and frees the memstick_dev structure via kfree(card).
However, the host controller driver (such as rtsx_usb_ms) is still running the request asynchronously in worker context. When the transfer eventually finishes, the driver writes into host->req->data, which points to memory inside the already freed card structure. This leads to a KASAN slab-use-after-free write:
BUG: KASAN: slab-use-after-free in ms_read_bytes+0x8fe/0x990 Write of size 1 at addr ffff88813c188079 by task kworker/1:5/5239 Workqueue: events rtsx_usb_ms_handle_req Call Trace: ms_read_bytes+0x8fe/0x990 drivers/memstick/host/rtsx_usb_ms.c:450 rtsx_usb_ms_issue_cmd drivers/memstick/host/rtsx_usb_ms.c:477 [inline]
rtsx_usb_ms_handle_req+0x557/0x1a00 drivers/memstick/host/rtsx_usb_ms.c:531 process_one_work+0xac7/0x1b10 kernel/workqueue.c:3396 worker_thread+0x5ef/0xe50 kernel/workqueue.c:3560 kthread+0x373/0x450 kernel/kthread.c:436
Allocated by task 1662: memstick_alloc_card drivers/memstick/core/memstick.c:383 [inline]
memstick_check+0x2c1/0x10d0 drivers/memstick/core/memstick.c:452 process_one_work+0xac7/0x1b10 kernel/workqueue.c:3396
Freed by task 1662: kfree+0x20c/0x650 mm/slub.c:6792 memstick_alloc_card drivers/memstick/core/memstick.c:420 [inline]
memstick_check+0x72b/0x10d0 drivers/memstick/core/memstick.c:452 process_one_work+0xac7/0x1b10 kernel/workqueue.c:3396
Host controller drivers (rtsx_usb_ms, jmb38x_ms, tifm_ms, r592) already implement their own hardware and bus timeouts, and callers in mspro_block and ms_block already rely on wait_for_completion() unconditionally.
Replace wait_for_completion_timeout() with wait_for_completion() in memstick_set_rw_addr() and memstick_alloc_card() so that the card structure is never freed while an asynchronous request is in flight.
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