[PATCH] mac80211: fix minstrel single-rate memory corruption

From: Bob Copeland
Date: Fri Jun 05 2009 - 08:23:05 EST


The minstrel rate controller periodically looks up rate indexes in
a sampling table. When accessing a specific row and column, minstrel
correctly does a bounds check which, on the surface, appears to handle
the case where mi->n_rates < 2. However, mi->sample_idx is actually
defined as an unsigned, so the right hand side is taken to be a huge
positive number when negative, and the check will always fail.

Consequently, the RC will overrun the array and cause random memory
corruption when communicating with a peer that has only a single rate.
The max value of mi->sample_idx is around 25 so casting to int should
have no ill effects.

Without the change, uptime is a few minutes under load with an AP
that has a single hard-coded rate, and both the AP and STA could
potentially crash. With the change, both lasted 12 hours with a
steady load.

Thanks to Ognjen Maric for providing the single-rate clue so I could
reproduce this.

This fixes http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12490 on the
regression list (also http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13000).

Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxx
Reported-by: Sergey S. Kostyliov <rathamahata@xxxxxxxxx>
Reported-by: Ognjen Maric <ognjen.maric@xxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Bob Copeland <me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---

John & Felix, the patch itself may be too subtle so feel free to do it a
different way. However this is as minimal as it gets so I hope it can
be applied quickly to stable, and mainline if not too late.

net/mac80211/rc80211_minstrel.c | 2 +-
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

diff --git a/net/mac80211/rc80211_minstrel.c b/net/mac80211/rc80211_minstrel.c
index d9233ec..2681dfa 100644
--- a/net/mac80211/rc80211_minstrel.c
+++ b/net/mac80211/rc80211_minstrel.c
@@ -216,7 +216,7 @@ minstrel_get_next_sample(struct minstrel_sta_info *mi)
unsigned int sample_ndx;
sample_ndx = SAMPLE_TBL(mi, mi->sample_idx, mi->sample_column);
mi->sample_idx++;
- if (mi->sample_idx > (mi->n_rates - 2)) {
+ if ((int) mi->sample_idx > (mi->n_rates - 2)) {
mi->sample_idx = 0;
mi->sample_column++;
if (mi->sample_column >= SAMPLE_COLUMNS)
--
1.5.4.1


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