Overview
About vulnerability
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm: do file ownership checks with the proper mount idmap
Ever since idmapped mounts were introduced, inode ownership checks (for side-channel protection) in mincore() and madvise(MADV_PAGEOUT) were done against the nop_mnt_idmap, which completely ignores the file’s mount’s idmap. This results in odd edgecases like:
- mount/bind-mount with an idmap userA:userB:1
- userB runs an owner_or_capable() check on file that is owned by userA on-disk/in-memory, but owned by userB after idmap translation
- owner_or_capable() mysteriously fails as the correct idmap wasn’t supplied
In the case of mincore/madvise MADV_PAGEOUT, this is usually benign, because file_permission(file, MAY_WRITE) will probably succeed, as it uses the proper idmap internally, but it does not need to be the case on e.g a 0444 file where even the owner itself doesn’t have permissions to write to it.
Since this is clearly not trivial to get right, introduce a file_owner_or_capable() that can carry the correct semantics, and switch the various users in mm to it.
The issue was found by manual code inspection & an off-list discussion with Jan Kara.
Details
- Affected product:
- AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , TuxCare 9.6 ESU
- Affected packages:
- kernel @ 5.14.0 (+1 more)