CVE-2021-47607 Affecting kernel-rt-debug-core package, versions *

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-rt-debug-core package and not the kernel-rt-debug-core package as distributed by Centos. See How to fix? for Centos:8 relevant fixed versions and status.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

bpf: Fix kernel address leakage in atomic cmpxchg's r0 aux reg

The implementation of BPF_CMPXCHG on a high level has the following parameters:

.-[old-val] .-[new-val] BPF_R0 = cmpxchg{32,64}(DST_REG + insn->off, BPF_R0, SRC_REG) -[mem-loc] -[old-val]

Given a BPF insn can only have two registers (dst, src), the R0 is fixed and used as an auxilliary register for input (old value) as well as output (returning old value from memory location). While the verifier performs a number of safety checks, it misses to reject unprivileged programs where R0 contains a pointer as old value.

Through brute-forcing it takes about ~16sec on my machine to leak a kernel pointer with BPF_CMPXCHG. The PoC is basically probing for kernel addresses by storing the guessed address into the map slot as a scalar, and using the map value pointer as R0 while SRC_REG has a canary value to detect a matching address.

Fix it by checking R0 for pointers, and reject if that's the case for unprivileged programs.

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2021-47607
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a82fe085f344ef20b452cd5f481010ff96b5c4cd
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f87a6c160ecc8c7b417d25f508d3f076fe346136