NULL Pointer Dereference Affecting kernel-devel package, versions *


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux security rating

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS
    0.04% (6th percentile)

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-RHEL7-KERNELDEVEL-8240352
  • published 22 Oct 2024
  • disclosed 21 Oct 2024

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for RHEL:7 kernel-devel.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-devel package and not the kernel-devel package as distributed by RHEL. See How to fix? for RHEL:7 relevant fixed versions and status.

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

f2fs: check discard support for conventional zones

As the helper function f2fs_bdev_support_discard() shows, f2fs checks if the target block devices support discard by calling bdev_max_discard_sectors() and bdev_is_zoned(). This check works well for most cases, but it does not work for conventional zones on zoned block devices. F2fs assumes that zoned block devices support discard, and calls __submit_discard_cmd(). When __submit_discard_cmd() is called for sequential write required zones, it works fine since __submit_discard_cmd() issues zone reset commands instead of discard commands. However, when __submit_discard_cmd() is called for conventional zones, __blkdev_issue_discard() is called even when the devices do not support discard.

The inappropriate __blkdev_issue_discard() call was not a problem before the commit 30f1e7241422 ("block: move discard checks into the ioctl handler") because __blkdev_issue_discard() checked if the target devices support discard or not. If not, it returned EOPNOTSUPP. After the commit, __blkdev_issue_discard() no longer checks it. It always returns zero and sets NULL to the given bio pointer. This NULL pointer triggers f2fs_bug_on() in __submit_discard_cmd(). The BUG is recreated with the commands below at the umount step, where /dev/nullb0 is a zoned null_blk with 5GB total size, 128MB zone size and 10 conventional zones.

$ mkfs.f2fs -f -m /dev/nullb0 $ mount /dev/nullb0 /mnt $ for ((i=0;i<5;i++)); do dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test bs=65536 count=1600 conv=fsync; done $ umount /mnt

To fix the BUG, avoid the inappropriate __blkdev_issue_discard() call. When discard is requested for conventional zones, check if the device supports discard or not. If not, return EOPNOTSUPP.

CVSS Scores

version 3.1
Expand this section

NVD

5.5 medium
  • Attack Vector (AV)
    Local
  • Attack Complexity (AC)
    Low
  • Privileges Required (PR)
    Low
  • User Interaction (UI)
    None
  • Scope (S)
    Unchanged
  • Confidentiality (C)
    None
  • Integrity (I)
    None
  • Availability (A)
    High
Expand this section

Red Hat

5.5 medium