CVE-2023-52836: locking/ww_mutex/test: Fix potential workqueue corruption

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

locking/ww_mutex/test: Fix potential workqueue corruption

In some cases running with the test-ww_mutex code, I was seeing
odd behavior where sometimes it seemed flush_workqueue was
returning before all the work threads were finished.

Often this would cause strange crashes as the mutexes would be
freed while they were being used.

Looking at the code, there is a lifetime problem as the
controlling thread that spawns the work allocates the
"struct stress" structures that are passed to the workqueue
threads. Then when the workqueue threads are finished,
they free the stress struct that was passed to them.

Unfortunately the workqueue work_struct node is in the stress
struct. Which means the work_struct is freed before the work
thread returns and while flush_workqueue is waiting.

It seems like a better idea to have the controlling thread
both allocate and free the stress structures, so that we can
be sure we don't corrupt the workqueue by freeing the structure
prematurely.

So this patch reworks the test to do so, and with this change
I no longer see the early flush_workqueue returns.

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2023-52836

Affected Products

Vendor: Linux

Product: Linux

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.04% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 15.26% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-02-04 (when was this score calculated)

References

Timeline

2024-12-20 00:32:20 UTC
CVE

locking/ww_mutex/test: Fix potential workqueue corruption