On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 10:55:32PM +0200, Sven Wegener wrote:
quoted text
> The code that hashes and unhashes connections from the connection table
> is missing locking of the connection being modified, which opens up a
> race condition and results in memory corruption when this race condition
> is hit.
> 
> Here is what happens in pretty verbose form:
> 
> CPU 0					CPU 1
> ------------				------------
> An active connection is terminated and
> we schedule ip_vs_conn_expire() on this
> CPU to expire this connection.
> 
> 					IRQ assignment is changed to this CPU,
> 					but the expire timer stays scheduled on
> 					the other CPU.
> 
> 					New connection from same ip:port comes
> 					in right before the timer expires, we
> 					find the inactive connection in our
> 					connection table and get a reference to
> 					it. We proper lock the connection in
> 					tcp_state_transition() and read the
> 					connection flags in set_tcp_state().
> 
> ip_vs_conn_expire() gets called, we
> unhash the connection from our
> connection table and remove the hashed
> flag in ip_vs_conn_unhash(), without
> proper locking!
> 
> 					While still holding proper locks we
> 					write the connection flags in
> 					set_tcp_state() and this sets the hashed
> 					flag again.
> 
> ip_vs_conn_expire() fails to expire the
> connection, because the other CPU has
> incremented the reference count. We try
> to re-insert the connection into our
> connection table, but this fails in
> ip_vs_conn_hash(), because the hashed
> flag has been set by the other CPU. We
> re-schedule execution of
> ip_vs_conn_expire(). Now this connection
> has the hashed flag set, but isn't
> actually hashed in our connection table
> and has a dangling list_head.
> 
> 					We drop the reference we held on the
> 					connection and schedule the expire timer
> 					for timeouting the connection on this
> 					CPU. Further packets won't be able to
> 					find this connection in our connection
> 					table.
> 
> 					ip_vs_conn_expire() gets called again,
> 					we think it's already hashed, but the
> 					list_head is dangling and while removing
> 					the connection from our connection table
> 					we write to the memory location where
> 					this list_head points to.
> 
> The result will probably be a kernel oops at some other point in time.

Nice analysis.

quoted text
> Signed-off-by: Sven Wegener <sven.wegener@stealer.net>
> Cc: stable@kernel.org

Acked-by: Simon Horman <horms@verge.net.au>

quoted text
> ---
>  net/netfilter/ipvs/ip_vs_conn.c |    4 ++++
>  1 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
> 
> This race condition is pretty subtle, but it can be triggered remotely.
> It needs the IRQ assignment change or another circumstance where packets
> coming from the same ip:port for the same service are being processed on
> different CPUs. And it involves hitting the exact time at which
> ip_vs_conn_expire() gets called. It can be avoided by making sure that
> all packets from one connection are always processed on the same CPU and
> can be made harder to exploit by changing the connection timeouts to
> some custom values.
> 
> diff --git a/net/netfilter/ipvs/ip_vs_conn.c b/net/netfilter/ipvs/ip_vs_conn.c
> index d8f7e8e..ff04e9e 100644
> --- a/net/netfilter/ipvs/ip_vs_conn.c
> +++ b/net/netfilter/ipvs/ip_vs_conn.c
> @@ -162,6 +162,7 @@ static inline int ip_vs_conn_hash(struct ip_vs_conn *cp)
>  	hash = ip_vs_conn_hashkey(cp->af, cp->protocol, &cp->caddr, cp->cport);
>  
>  	ct_write_lock(hash);
> +	spin_lock(&cp->lock);
>  
>  	if (!(cp->flags & IP_VS_CONN_F_HASHED)) {
>  		list_add(&cp->c_list, &ip_vs_conn_tab[hash]);
> @@ -174,6 +175,7 @@ static inline int ip_vs_conn_hash(struct ip_vs_conn *cp)
>  		ret = 0;
>  	}
>  
> +	spin_unlock(&cp->lock);
>  	ct_write_unlock(hash);
>  
>  	return ret;
> @@ -193,6 +195,7 @@ static inline int ip_vs_conn_unhash(struct ip_vs_conn *cp)
>  	hash = ip_vs_conn_hashkey(cp->af, cp->protocol, &cp->caddr, cp->cport);
>  
>  	ct_write_lock(hash);
> +	spin_lock(&cp->lock);
>  
>  	if (cp->flags & IP_VS_CONN_F_HASHED) {
>  		list_del(&cp->c_list);
> @@ -202,6 +205,7 @@ static inline int ip_vs_conn_unhash(struct ip_vs_conn *cp)
>  	} else
>  		ret = 0;
>  
> +	spin_unlock(&cp->lock);
>  	ct_write_unlock(hash);
>  
>  	return ret;
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html