Comment 0 for bug 1314762

Revision history for this message
John Johansen (jjohansen) wrote : n_tty_write crash when echoing in raw mode

The tty atomic_write_lock does not provide an exclusion guarantee for
the tty driver if the termios settings are LECHO & !OPOST. And since
it is unexpected and not allowed to call TTY buffer helpers like
tty_insert_flip_string concurrently, this may lead to crashes when
concurrect writers call pty_write. In that case the following two
writers:
* the ECHOing from a workqueue and
* pty_write from the process
race and can overflow the corresponding TTY buffer like follows.

If we look into tty_insert_flip_string_fixed_flag, there is:
  int space = __tty_buffer_request_room(port, goal, flags);
  struct tty_buffer *tb = port->buf.tail;
  ...
  memcpy(char_buf_ptr(tb, tb->used), chars, space);
  ...
  tb->used += space;

so the race of the two can result in something like this:
              A B
__tty_buffer_request_room
                                  __tty_buffer_request_room
memcpy(buf(tb->used), ...)
tb->used += space;
                                  memcpy(buf(tb->used), ...) ->BOOM

B's memcpy is past the tty_buffer due to the previous A's tb->used
increment.

Since the N_TTY line discipline input processing can output
concurrently with a tty write, obtain the N_TTY ldisc output_lock to
serialize echo output with normal tty writes. This ensures the tty
buffer helper tty_insert_flip_string is not called concurrently and
everything is fine.

Note that this is nicely reproducible by an ordinary user using
forkpty and some setup around that (raw termios + ECHO). And it is
exploitable in kernels at least after commit
d945cb9cce20ac7143c2de8d88b187f62db99bdc (pty: Rework the pty layer to
use the normal buffering logic) in 2.6.31-rc3.

js: add more info to the commit log
js: switch to bool

Reported-and-tested-by: Jiri Slaby <email address hidden>
Signed-off-by: Peter Hurley <email address hidden>
Signed-off-by: Jiri Slaby <email address hidden>
Cc: Alan Cox <email address hidden>