Improper Locking Affecting kernel-default package, versions <5.14.21-150400.24.128.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.04% (5th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-SLES154-KERNELDEFAULT-7689519
  • published16 Aug 2024
  • disclosed15 Aug 2024

Introduced: 15 Aug 2024

CVE-2021-47587  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-667  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade SLES:15.4 kernel-default to version 5.14.21-150400.24.128.1 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-default package and not the kernel-default package as distributed by SLES. See How to fix? for SLES:15.4 relevant fixed versions and status.

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

net: systemport: Add global locking for descriptor lifecycle

The descriptor list is a shared resource across all of the transmit queues, and the locking mechanism used today only protects concurrency across a given transmit queue between the transmit and reclaiming. This creates an opportunity for the SYSTEMPORT hardware to work on corrupted descriptors if we have multiple producers at once which is the case when using multiple transmit queues.

This was particularly noticeable when using multiple flows/transmit queues and it showed up in interesting ways in that UDP packets would get a correct UDP header checksum being calculated over an incorrect packet length. Similarly TCP packets would get an equally correct checksum computed by the hardware over an incorrect packet length.

The SYSTEMPORT hardware maintains an internal descriptor list that it re-arranges when the driver produces a new descriptor anytime it writes to the WRITE_PORT_{HI,LO} registers, there is however some delay in the hardware to re-organize its descriptors and it is possible that concurrent TX queues eventually break this internal allocation scheme to the point where the length/status part of the descriptor gets used for an incorrect data buffer.

The fix is to impose a global serialization for all TX queues in the short section where we are writing to the WRITE_PORT_{HI,LO} registers which solves the corruption even with multiple concurrent TX queues being used.

CVSS Scores

version 3.1