[ 3.5.y.z extended stable ] Patch "TTY: do not update atime/mtime on read/write" has been added to staging queue

[Luis Henriques]

This is a note to let you know that I have just added a patch titled

    TTY: do not update atime/mtime on read/write

to the linux-3.5.y-queue branch of the 3.5.y.z extended stable tree 
which can be found at:

 http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/linux.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/linux-3.5.y-queue

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to this tree, please 
reply to this email.

For more information about the 3.5.y.z tree, see
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Dev/ExtendedStable

Thanks.
-Luis

------

>From a992912d4b00defcd633c550955f02ff0d3c72d4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jiri Slaby <jslaby at suse.cz>
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2013 15:25:05 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] TTY: do not update atime/mtime on read/write

commit b0de59b5733d18b0d1974a060860a8b5c1b36a2e upstream.

On http://vladz.devzero.fr/013_ptmx-timing.php, we can see how to find
out length of a password using timestamps of /dev/ptmx. It is
documented in "Timing Analysis of Keystrokes and Timing Attacks on
SSH". To avoid that problem, do not update time when reading
from/writing to a TTY.

I am afraid of regressions as this is a behavior we have since 0.97
and apps may expect the time to be current, e.g. for monitoring
whether there was a change on the TTY. Now, there is no change. So
this would better have a lot of testing before it goes upstream.

References: CVE-2013-0160

Signed-off-by: Jiri Slaby <jslaby at suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh at linuxfoundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Luis Henriques <luis.henriques at canonical.com>
---
 drivers/tty/tty_io.c | 8 ++------
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

diff --git a/drivers/tty/tty_io.c b/drivers/tty/tty_io.c
index b425c79..e0767b7 100644
--- a/drivers/tty/tty_io.c
+++ b/drivers/tty/tty_io.c
@@ -975,8 +975,7 @@ static ssize_t tty_read(struct file *file, char __user *buf, size_t count,
 	else
 		i = -EIO;
 	tty_ldisc_deref(ld);
-	if (i > 0)
-		inode->i_atime = current_fs_time(inode->i_sb);
+
 	return i;
 }

@@ -1077,11 +1076,8 @@ static inline ssize_t do_tty_write(
 			break;
 		cond_resched();
 	}
-	if (written) {
-		struct inode *inode = file->f_path.dentry->d_inode;
-		inode->i_mtime = current_fs_time(inode->i_sb);
+	if (written)
 		ret = written;
-	}
 out:
 	tty_write_unlock(tty);
 	return ret;
--
1.8.1.2