DocumentationOverview
About vulnerability
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net/sched: act_gact, act_police: range check the fallback control action
tcf_action_check_ctrlact() range checks the primary control action:
if (!opcode) ret = action > TC_ACT_VALUE_MAX ? -EINVAL : 0;
TC_ACT_VALUE_MAX is TC_ACT_TRAP, so kernel-internal verdicts above it cannot be set that way. But act_gact and act_police each carry a second, independent control action supplied by user space that never reaches that helper - TCA_GACT_PROB.paction and TCA_POLICE_RESULT. Both only reject TC_ACT_GOTO_CHAIN, so any other value is stored verbatim and returned verbatim from the action.
In particular user space can store TC_ACT_CONSUMED, which is TC_ACT_VALUE_MAX + 1 and is deliberately not part of the UAPI value range. That verdict tells every caller the action took ownership of the skb, so nobody frees it: sch_handle_ingress(), sch_handle_egress() and tcf_qevent_handle() all deliberately skip the free for it. The result is one leaked sk_buff plus its data buffer per packet traversing the filter, unbounded, for all traffic on the chain including kernel-generated packets.
Both are trivially deterministic. act_gact clamps tcfg_pval to >= 1, so with pval = 1 gact_determ() returns the fallback for every packet. act_police has no mandatory rate, so rate = 0 leaves tcfp_mtu = ~0 and tcf_police_mtu_check() always passes.
TC_ACT_CONSUMED was added by commit 720f22fed81b (“net: sched: refactor reinsert action”), after both goto-chain guards were written: commit 9469f375ab09 (“net/sched: act_gact: disallow ‘goto chain’ on fallback control action”) and commit c08f5ed5d625 (“net/sched: act_police: disallow ‘goto chain’ on fallback control action”). Neither guard was widened when the new verdict appeared.
Factor the existing range test out of tcf_action_check_ctrlact() as tcf_action_valid() and apply it to both fallbacks. The helper cannot call tcf_action_check_ctrlact() directly because that also allocates a goto_chain, which is exactly what these two sites must not do.
Reproduced on v7.2-rc6: kmemleak reports one leaked 232-byte skbuff_head_cache object plus its 704-byte data buffer per packet. With this patch both configurations are rejected with -EINVAL and kmemleak reports none.
Details
- Affected product:
- AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , Amazon Linux 2 ELS , CentOS 8.4 ELS , CentOS 8.5 ELS , CentOS Stream 8 ELS , Debian 10 ELS , Debian 11 ELS , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , TuxCare 9.8 ESU , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS
- Affected packages:
- linux @ 4.19.0 (+10 more)
Fixes
KernelCare state
Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.
| Operating system | Status | Covered kernels |
|---|---|---|
| Debian 12 | Released |
43 kernels
|
| Debian 13 | Released |
15 kernels
|
| Oracle Linux 8 UEK 7 | Released |
112 kernels
|
| Oracle Linux 9 UEK 7 | Released |
112 kernels
|
| Ubuntu 22.04 | Planned | — |
| Ubuntu 22.04 AWS | Planned | — |
| Ubuntu 22.04 Azure | Planned | — |