If userspace supplies an invalid pointer to a read() of an inotify
instance, the inotify device's event list mutex is unlocked twice.
This causes an unbalance which effectively leaves the data structure
unprotected, and we can trigger oopses by accessing the inotify
instance from different tasks concurrently.
The best fix (contributed largely by Linus) is a total rewrite
of the function in question:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 7:05 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> The thing to notice is that:
>
> - locking is done in just one place, and there is no question about it
> not having an unlock.
>
> - that whole double-while(1)-loop thing is gone.
>
> - use multiple functions to make nesting and error handling sane
>
> - do error testing after doing the things you always need to do, ie do
> this:
>
> mutex_lock(..)
> ret = function_call();
> mutex_unlock(..)
>
> .. test ret here ..
>
> instead of doing conditional exits with unlocking or freeing.
>
> So if the code is written in this way, it may still be buggy, but at least
> it's not buggy because of subtle "forgot to unlock" or "forgot to free"
> issues.
>
> This _always_ unlocks if it locked, and it always frees if it got a
> non-error kevent.
Cc: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Cc: Robert Love <rlove@google.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The problems lie in the types used for some inotify interfaces, both at the kernel level and at the glibc level. This mail addresses the kernel problem. I will follow up with some suggestions for glibc changes.
For the sys_inotify_rm_watch() interface, the type of the 'wd' argument is
currently 'u32', it should be '__s32' . That is Robert's suggestion, and
is consistent with the other declarations of watch descriptors in the
kernel source, in particular, the inotify_event structure in
include/linux/inotify.h:
struct inotify_event {
__s32 wd; /* watch descriptor */
__u32 mask; /* watch mask */
__u32 cookie; /* cookie to synchronize two events */
__u32 len; /* length (including nulls) of name */
char name[0]; /* stub for possible name */
};
The patch makes the changes needed for inotify_rm_watch().
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@googlemail.com>
Cc: Robert Love <rlove@google.com>
Cc: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@gmail.com>
Cc: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Creating a generic filesystem notification interface, fsnotify, which will be
used by inotify, dnotify, and eventually fanotify is really starting to
clutter the fs directory. This patch simply moves inotify and dnotify into
fs/notify/inotify and fs/notify/dnotify respectively to make both current fs/
and future notification tidier.
Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
