Overview
About vulnerability
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
fsnotify: do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events on child for special files
inotify/fanotify do not allow users with no read access to a file to subscribe to events (e.g. IN_ACCESS/IN_MODIFY), but they do allow the same user to subscribe for watching events on children when the user has access to the parent directory (e.g. /dev).
Users with no read access to a file but with read access to its parent directory can still stat the file and see if it was accessed/modified via atime/mtime change.
The same is not true for special files (e.g. /dev/null). Users will not generally observe atime/mtime changes when other users read/write to special files, only when someone sets atime/mtime via utimensat().
Align fsnotify events with this stat behavior and do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events to parent watchers on read/write of special files. The events are still generated to parent watchers on utimensat(). This closes some side-channels that could be possibly used for information exfiltration [1].
Details
- Affected product:
- Ubuntu 20.04 ELS
- Affected packages:
- linux @ 5.4.0
Fixes
KernelCare state
Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.
| Operating system | Status | Covered kernels |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Linux 2023 | Planned | — |
| Debian 11 | Released |
37 kernels
|
| Debian 11 cloud | Released |
17 kernels
|
| Debian 12 | Planned | — |
| Debian 13 | Planned | — |
| Oracle Linux 8 UEK 7 | Released |
85 kernels
|
| Oracle Linux 9 UEK 7 | Released |
85 kernels
|
| Proxmox VE 7 5.15 | Released |
47 kernels
|
| Ubuntu 20.04 HWE AWS | Released |
57 kernels
|
| Ubuntu 20.04 HWE Azure | Released |
40 kernels
|
| Ubuntu 22.04 | Released |
90 kernels
|
| Ubuntu 22.04 AWS | Released |
81 kernels
|
| Ubuntu 22.04 Azure | Released |
73 kernels
|
| Ubuntu 24.04 | Will Not Fix |
41 kernels
|
| Ubuntu 24.04 AWS | Planned | — |