CVE-2009-4026: Race Condition

Lennert Buytenhek noticed that delBA handling in mac80211 was broken and has remotely triggerable problems, some of which are due to some code shuffling I did that ended up changing the order in which things were done -- this was

commit d75636ef9c1af224f1097941879d5a8db7cd04e5 Author: Johannes Berg <johannes> Date: Tue Feb 10 21:25:53 2009 +0100

mac80211: RX aggregation: clean up stop session

and other parts were already present in the original

commit d92684e66091c0f0101819619b315b4bb8b5bcc5 Author: Ron Rindjunsky <ron.rindjunsky> Date: Mon Jan 28 14:07:22 2008 +0200

mac80211: A-MPDU Tx add delBA from recipient support

The first problem is that I moved a BUGON before various checks -- thereby making it possible to hit. As the comment indicates, the BUGON can be removed since the ampduaction callback must already exist when the state is != IDLE.

The second problem isn't easily exploitable but there's a race condition due to unconditionally setting the state to OPERATIONAL when a delBA frame is received, even when no aggregation session was ever initiated. All the drivers accept stopping the session even then, but that opens a race window where crashes could happen before the driver accepts it. Right now, a WARNON may happen with non-HT drivers, while the race opens only for HT drivers.

For this case, there are two things necessary to fix it: 1) don't process spurious delBA frames, and be more careful about the session state; don't drop the lock

2) HT drivers need to be prepared to handle a session stop even before the session was really started -- this is true for all drivers (that support aggregation) but iwlwifi which can be fixed easily. The other HT drivers (ath9k and ar9170) are behaving properly already.