[3.11.y.z extended stable] Patch "ALSA: control: Fix replacing user controls" has been added to staging queue

Luis Henriques luis.henriques at canonical.com
Tue Jul 1 08:51:27 UTC 2014


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

    ALSA: control: Fix replacing user controls

to the linux-3.11.y-queue branch of the 3.11.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-3.11.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 3.11.y.z tree, see
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Dev/ExtendedStable

Thanks.
-Luis

------

>From d669e8f0e1b20745aa970526dd0d988bfe4ed502 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Lars-Peter Clausen <lars at metafoo.de>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 13:32:32 +0200
Subject: ALSA: control: Fix replacing user controls

commit 82262a46627bebb0febcc26664746c25cef08563 upstream.

There are two issues with the current implementation for replacing user
controls. The first is that the code does not check if the control is actually a
user control and neither does it check if the control is owned by the process
that tries to remove it. That allows userspace applications to remove arbitrary
controls, which can cause a user after free if a for example a driver does not
expect a control to be removed from under its feed.

The second issue is that on one hand when a control is replaced the
user_ctl_count limit is not checked and on the other hand the user_ctl_count is
increased (even though the number of user controls does not change). This allows
userspace, once the user_ctl_count limit as been reached, to repeatedly replace
a control until user_ctl_count overflows. Once that happens new controls can be
added effectively bypassing the user_ctl_count limit.

Both issues can be fixed by instead of open-coding the removal of the control
that is to be replaced to use snd_ctl_remove_user_ctl(). This function does
proper permission checks as well as decrements user_ctl_count after the control
has been removed.

Note that by using snd_ctl_remove_user_ctl() the check which returns -EBUSY at
beginning of the function if the control already exists is removed. This is not
a problem though since the check is quite useless, because the lock that is
protecting the control list is released between the check and before adding the
new control to the list, which means that it is possible that a different
control with the same settings is added to the list after the check. Luckily
there is another check that is done while holding the lock in snd_ctl_add(), so
we'll rely on that to make sure that the same control is not added twice.

Signed-off-by: Lars-Peter Clausen <lars at metafoo.de>
Acked-by: Jaroslav Kysela <perex at perex.cz>
Signed-off-by: Takashi Iwai <tiwai at suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Luis Henriques <luis.henriques at canonical.com>
---
 sound/core/control.c | 25 +++++++++----------------
 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)

diff --git a/sound/core/control.c b/sound/core/control.c
index 183fab277b69..15bc84492746 100644
--- a/sound/core/control.c
+++ b/sound/core/control.c
@@ -1155,8 +1155,6 @@ static int snd_ctl_elem_add(struct snd_ctl_file *file,
 	struct user_element *ue;
 	int idx, err;

-	if (!replace && card->user_ctl_count >= MAX_USER_CONTROLS)
-		return -ENOMEM;
 	if (info->count < 1)
 		return -EINVAL;
 	access = info->access == 0 ? SNDRV_CTL_ELEM_ACCESS_READWRITE :
@@ -1165,21 +1163,16 @@ static int snd_ctl_elem_add(struct snd_ctl_file *file,
 				 SNDRV_CTL_ELEM_ACCESS_TLV_READWRITE));
 	info->id.numid = 0;
 	memset(&kctl, 0, sizeof(kctl));
-	down_write(&card->controls_rwsem);
-	_kctl = snd_ctl_find_id(card, &info->id);
-	err = 0;
-	if (_kctl) {
-		if (replace)
-			err = snd_ctl_remove(card, _kctl);
-		else
-			err = -EBUSY;
-	} else {
-		if (replace)
-			err = -ENOENT;
+
+	if (replace) {
+		err = snd_ctl_remove_user_ctl(file, &info->id);
+		if (err)
+			return err;
 	}
-	up_write(&card->controls_rwsem);
-	if (err < 0)
-		return err;
+
+	if (card->user_ctl_count >= MAX_USER_CONTROLS)
+		return -ENOMEM;
+
 	memcpy(&kctl.id, &info->id, sizeof(info->id));
 	kctl.count = info->owner ? info->owner : 1;
 	access |= SNDRV_CTL_ELEM_ACCESS_USER;
--
1.9.1





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