Overview
About vulnerability
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
eventfs: Use children field for rcu head and add memory barriers
When an eventfs inode is freed, it sets ei->is_freed and then uses its ei->list to add it to the srcu link list as the list field is a union with the rcu list head. As the ei->list is used to iterate over an SRCU protected list without taking the eventfs_mutex, there’s nothing stopping the iteration over that list to see the ei->rcu instead of the ei->list and it will read a corrupt target.
To fix this, change the union of the rcu list head with the children list. On freeing the eventfs inode, set the is_free and execute a smp_wmb() before adding the eventfs inode to the SRCU list.
On iteration of the ei->children list, at the start, execute a smp_rmb() and then read the is_freed of the ei to see if the children list is still valid. If is_freed is set, then the ei_child read is not valid and the loop should exit immediately.
Details
- Affected product:
- Debian 10 ELS
- Affected packages:
- linux @ 4.19.0