Use of Uninitialized Variable Affecting kernel-tools 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-RHEL8-KERNELTOOLS-7937460
  • published 12 Sep 2024
  • disclosed 11 Sep 2024

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for RHEL:8 kernel-tools.

NVD Description

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

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

fix bitmap corruption on close_range() with CLOSE_RANGE_UNSHARE

copy_fd_bitmaps(new, old, count) is expected to copy the first count/BITS_PER_LONG bits from old->full_fds_bits[] and fill the rest with zeroes. What it does is copying enough words (BITS_TO_LONGS(count/BITS_PER_LONG)), then memsets the rest. That works fine, if all bits past the cutoff point are clear. Otherwise we are risking garbage from the last word we'd copied.

For most of the callers that is true - expand_fdtable() has count equal to old->max_fds, so there's no open descriptors past count, let alone fully occupied words in ->open_fds[], which is what bits in ->full_fds_bits[] correspond to.

The other caller (dup_fd()) passes sane_fdtable_size(old_fdt, max_fds), which is the smallest multiple of BITS_PER_LONG that covers all opened descriptors below max_fds. In the common case (copying on fork()) max_fds is ~0U, so all opened descriptors will be below it and we are fine, by the same reasons why the call in expand_fdtable() is safe.

Unfortunately, there is a case where max_fds is less than that and where we might, indeed, end up with junk in ->full_fds_bits[] - close_range(from, to, CLOSE_RANGE_UNSHARE) with * descriptor table being currently shared * 'to' being above the current capacity of descriptor table * 'from' being just under some chunk of opened descriptors. In that case we end up with observably wrong behaviour - e.g. spawn a child with CLONE_FILES, get all descriptors in range 0..127 open, then close_range(64, ~0U, CLOSE_RANGE_UNSHARE) and watch dup(0) ending up with descriptor #128, despite #64 being observably not open.

The minimally invasive fix would be to deal with that in dup_fd(). If this proves to add measurable overhead, we can go that way, but let's try to fix copy_fd_bitmaps() first.

  • new helper: bitmap_copy_and_expand(to, from, bits_to_copy, size).
  • make copy_fd_bitmaps() take the bitmap size in words, rather than bits; it's 'count' argument is always a multiple of BITS_PER_LONG, so we are not losing any information, and that way we can use the same helper for all three bitmaps - compiler will see that count is a multiple of BITS_PER_LONG for the large ones, so it'll generate plain memcpy()+memset().

Reproducer added to tools/testing/selftests/core/close_range_test.c

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
Expand this section

SUSE

5.5 medium