CVE-2024-35860: bpf: support deferring bpf_link dealloc to after RCU grace period

Description

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

bpf: support deferring bpf_link dealloc to after RCU grace period

BPF link for some program types is passed as a "context" which can be
used by those BPF programs to look up additional information. E.g., for
multi-kprobes and multi-uprobes, link is used to fetch BPF cookie values.

Because of this runtime dependency, when bpf_link refcnt drops to zero
there could still be active BPF programs running accessing link data.

This patch adds generic support to defer bpf_link dealloc callback to
after RCU GP, if requested. This is done by exposing two different
deallocation callbacks, one synchronous and one deferred. If deferred
one is provided, bpf_link_free() will schedule dealloc_deferred()
callback to happen after RCU GP.

BPF is using two flavors of RCU: "classic" non-sleepable one and RCU
tasks trace one. The latter is used when sleepable BPF programs are
used. bpf_link_free() accommodates that by checking underlying BPF
program's sleepable flag, and goes either through normal RCU GP only for
non-sleepable, or through RCU tasks trace GP *and* then normal RCU GP
(taking into account rcu_trace_implies_rcu_gp() optimization), if BPF
program is sleepable.

We use this for multi-kprobe and multi-uprobe links, which dereference
link during program run. We also preventively switch raw_tp link to use
deferred dealloc callback, as upcoming changes in bpf-next tree expose
raw_tp link data (specifically, cookie va...

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2024-35860

Affected Products

Vendor: Linux

Product: Linux

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.05% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 17.83% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

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

References

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/876941f533e7b47fc69977fc4551c02f2d18af97
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5d8d447777564b35f67000e7838e7ccb64d525c8
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1a80dbcb2dbaf6e4c216e62e30fa7d3daa8001ce

Timeline