The flaw is a memory‑leak in the Industrial I/O (IIO) buffer subsystem. In iio_buffer_enqueue_dmabuf() a DMA fence is allocated and its reference counter is incremented twice, but on success the initial reference is never released. This leaks a 104‑byte kmalloc allocation that persists for the lifetime of the system. Enqueuing buffers at high frequency can accumulate thousands of allocations per second, exhausting kernel memory and potentially forcing a reboot or causing a denial of service. The weakness is classified as CWE‑772: Unreleased Resource after Successful Use.

All Linux kernel releases that include the IIO buffer subsystem before the commit that adds dma_fence_put after dma_resv_add_fence. Any system that exposes IIO devices capable of DMA buffer enqueuing—such as kernel modules for sensors or ADCs—may be impacted. The vulnerability applies to the core Linux kernel.

The CVSS score of 5.5 places this vulnerability in the medium severity range, and its EPSS score is less than 1%, indicating a low probability of timely exploitation. It is not listed in CISA’s KEV catalog. The likely attack vector is via a privileged driver or process that enqueues IIO DMA buffers; it is not exploitable from ordinary user space. An attacker would need to trigger repeated, high‑frequency buffer enqueues to exhaust kernel memory, leading to service degradation or crash. No public exploits are available, and the flaw does not provide remote code execution, but it can result in a denial of service if abused.