Description

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

netlink: terminate outstanding dump on socket close

Netlink supports iterative dumping of data. It provides the families
the following ops:
- start - (optional) kicks off the dumping process
- dump - actual dump helper, keeps getting called until it returns 0
- done - (optional) pairs with .start, can be used for cleanup
The whole process is asynchronous and the repeated calls to .dump
don't actually happen in a tight loop, but rather are triggered
in response to recvmsg() on the socket.

This gives the user full control over the dump, but also means that
the user can close the socket without getting to the end of the dump.
To make sure .start is always paired with .done we check if there
is an ongoing dump before freeing the socket, and if so call .done.

The complication is that sockets can get freed from BH and .done
is allowed to sleep. So we use a workqueue to defer the call, when
needed.

Unfortunately this does not work correctly. What we defer is not
the cleanup but rather releasing a reference on the socket.
We have no guarantee that we own the last reference, if someone
else holds the socket they may release it in BH and we're back
to square one.

The whole dance, however, appears to be unnecessary. Only the user
can interact with dumps, so we can clean up when socket is closed.
And close always happens in process context. Some async code may
still access the socket after close, queue noti...

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2024-53140

CVSS Base Severity: LOW

CVSS Base Score: 0.0

Affected Products

Vendor: Linux

Product: Linux

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.04% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 5.06% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-02-03 (when was this score calculated)

References

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4e87a52133284afbd40fb522dbf96e258af52a98
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/bbc769d2fa1b8b368c5fbe013b5b096afa3c05ca
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/176c41b3ca9281a9736b67c6121b03dbf0c8c08f
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1904fb9ebf911441f90a68e96b22aa73e4410505

Timeline