Advisory Published
Updated

CVE-2022-48853: swiotlb: fix info leak with DMA_FROM_DEVICE

First published: Tue Jul 16 2024(Updated: )

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: swiotlb: fix info leak with DMA_FROM_DEVICE The problem I'm addressing was discovered by the LTP test covering cve-2018-1000204. A short description of what happens follows: 1) The test case issues a command code 00 (TEST UNIT READY) via the SG_IO interface with: dxfer_len == 524288, dxdfer_dir == SG_DXFER_FROM_DEV and a corresponding dxferp. The peculiar thing about this is that TUR is not reading from the device. 2) In sg_start_req() the invocation of blk_rq_map_user() effectively bounces the user-space buffer. As if the device was to transfer into it. Since commit a45b599ad808 ("scsi: sg: allocate with __GFP_ZERO in sg_build_indirect()") we make sure this first bounce buffer is allocated with GFP_ZERO. 3) For the rest of the story we keep ignoring that we have a TUR, so the device won't touch the buffer we prepare as if the we had a DMA_FROM_DEVICE type of situation. My setup uses a virtio-scsi device and the buffer allocated by SG is mapped by the function virtqueue_add_split() which uses DMA_FROM_DEVICE for the "in" sgs (here scatter-gather and not scsi generics). This mapping involves bouncing via the swiotlb (we need swiotlb to do virtio in protected guest like s390 Secure Execution, or AMD SEV). 4) When the SCSI TUR is done, we first copy back the content of the second (that is swiotlb) bounce buffer (which most likely contains some previous IO data), to the first bounce buffer, which contains all zeros. Then we copy back the content of the first bounce buffer to the user-space buffer. 5) The test case detects that the buffer, which it zero-initialized, ain't all zeros and fails. One can argue that this is an swiotlb problem, because without swiotlb we leak all zeros, and the swiotlb should be transparent in a sense that it does not affect the outcome (if all other participants are well behaved). Copying the content of the original buffer into the swiotlb buffer is the only way I can think of to make swiotlb transparent in such scenarios. So let's do just that if in doubt, but allow the driver to tell us that the whole mapped buffer is going to be overwritten, in which case we can preserve the old behavior and avoid the performance impact of the extra bounce.

Credit: 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67

Affected SoftwareAffected VersionHow to fix
Linux Linux kernel<4.9.320
Linux Linux kernel>=4.10<4.14.281
Linux Linux kernel>=4.15<4.19.245
Linux Linux kernel>=4.20<5.4.189
Linux Linux kernel>=5.5<5.10.110
Linux Linux kernel>=5.11<5.15.29
Linux Linux kernel>=5.16<5.16.15

Never miss a vulnerability like this again

Sign up to SecAlerts for real-time vulnerability data matched to your software, aggregated from hundreds of sources.

Contact

SecAlerts Pty Ltd.
132 Wickham Terrace
Fortitude Valley,
QLD 4006, Australia
info@secalerts.co
By using SecAlerts services, you agree to our services end-user license agreement. This website is safeguarded by reCAPTCHA and governed by the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. All names, logos, and brands of products are owned by their respective owners, and any usage of these names, logos, and brands for identification purposes only does not imply endorsement. If you possess any content that requires removal, please get in touch with us.
© 2024 SecAlerts Pty Ltd.
ABN: 70 645 966 203, ACN: 645 966 203