[3.5.y.z extended stable] Patch "ipc/msg: fix race around refcount" has been added to staging queue

Luis Henriques luis.henriques at canonical.com
Mon Mar 31 12:57:07 UTC 2014


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

    ipc/msg: fix race around refcount

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 059bb221e401c69740afa9d6f6c5d42f9015c762 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Konstantin Khlebnikov <k.khlebnikov at samsung.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 14:12:19 +0400
Subject: ipc/msg: fix race around refcount

[fixed differently in 6062a8dc0517bce23e3c2f7d2fea5e22411269a3 upstream.]

In older kernels (before v3.10) ipc_rcu_hdr->refcount was non-atomic int.
There was possuble double-free bug: do_msgsnd() calls ipc_rcu_putref() under
msq->q_perm->lock and RCU, while freequeue() calls it while it holds only
'rw_mutex', so there is no sinchronization between them. Two function
decrements '2' non-atomically, they both can get '0' as result.

do_msgsnd()					freequeue()

msq = msg_lock_check(ns, msqid);
...
ipc_rcu_getref(msq);
msg_unlock(msq);
schedule();
						(caller locks spinlock)
						expunge_all(msq, -EIDRM);
						ss_wakeup(&msq->q_senders, 1);
						msg_rmid(ns, msq);
						msg_unlock(msq);
ipc_lock_by_ptr(&msq->q_perm);
ipc_rcu_putref(msq);				ipc_rcu_putref(msq);
< both may get get --(...)->refcount == 0 >

This patch locks ipc_lock and RCU around ipc_rcu_putref in freequeue.
( RCU protects memory for spin_unlock() )

Similar bugs might be in other users of ipc_rcu_putref().

In the mainline this has been fixed in v3.10 indirectly in commmit
6062a8dc0517bce23e3c2f7d2fea5e22411269a3
("ipc,sem: fine grained locking for semtimedop") by Rik van Riel.
That commit optimized locking and converted refcount into atomic.

I'm not sure that anybody should care about this bug: it's very-very unlikely
and no longer exists in actual mainline. I've found this just by looking into
the code, probably this never happens in real life.

Signed-off-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov <k.khlebnikov at samsung.com>
Signed-off-by: Luis Henriques <luis.henriques at canonical.com>
---
 ipc/msg.c | 2 ++
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

diff --git a/ipc/msg.c b/ipc/msg.c
index 7385de2..25f1a61 100644
--- a/ipc/msg.c
+++ b/ipc/msg.c
@@ -296,7 +296,9 @@ static void freeque(struct ipc_namespace *ns, struct kern_ipc_perm *ipcp)
 	}
 	atomic_sub(msq->q_cbytes, &ns->msg_bytes);
 	security_msg_queue_free(msq);
+	ipc_lock_by_ptr(&msq->q_perm);
 	ipc_rcu_putref(msq);
+	ipc_unlock(&msq->q_perm);
 }

 /*
--
1.9.1





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