> > On Thu, 10 Apr 2008, Michal Hocko wrote:
> >
> > > > Jeff Robertson analyzes the behaviour of different operating systems'
> > > > 64-bit file offset implementation and concludes that on 32-bit
> > > > machines, Linux and Solaris lack any locking to keep the two 32-bit
> > > > halves in sync and this could cause rare file offset corruption.
> > > >
http://jeffr-tech.livejournal.com/21014.html
> > > AFAICS, this race is theoretically possible, but it is very hard (almost
> > > impossible) to trigger with a sane file usage pattern. Note that you
> > > have to access shared struct file (same file descriptor) in different
> > > threads which should be synchronized by caller anyway (*).
> >
> > ... but not in cases the caller is an intentionally evil code, right? :)
> Yes.
>
> > > I also don't see any security implications from this race, but maybe
> > > someone with more knowlage about fs can see (f_pos is used at many
> > > places in the kernel code).
> >
> > The f_pos races are in fact exploitable, we've already been there. See
> > for example
http://www.isec.pl/vulnerabilities/isec-0016-procleaks.txt
> Well, this race is more subtle - the window is just one instruction
> wide (stores to f_pos from CPU2 must come between the store of lower and
> upper 32-bits of f_pos on CPU1). And the only result is that f_pos has
> 32-bits from one file pointer and 32-bits from the other one. So I can
> hardly imagine this would be exploitable...
