Re: [PATCH] fscrypt: lock mutex before checking for bounce page pool

[Eric Biggers]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 10:22:52PM -0700, Eric Biggers wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 06, 2017 at 10:57:48AM -0700, Eric Biggers wrote:
> > fscrypt_initialize(), which allocates the global bounce page pool when
> > an encrypted file is first accessed, uses "double-checked locking" to
> > try to avoid locking fscrypt_init_mutex.  However, it doesn't use any
> > memory barriers, so it's theoretically possible for a thread to observe
> > a bounce page pool which has not been fully initialized.  This is a
> > classic bug with "double-checked locking".
> > 
> > While "only a theoretical issue" in the latest kernel, in pre-4.8
> > kernels the pointer that was checked was not even the last to be
> > initialized, so it was easily possible for a crash (NULL pointer
> > dereference) to happen.  This was changed only incidentally by the large
> > refactor to use fs/crypto/.
> > 
> > Solve both problems in a trivial way that can easily be backported: just
> > always take the mutex.  It's theoretically less efficient, but it
> > shouldn't be noticeable in practice as the mutex is only acquired very
> > briefly once per encrypted file.
> > 
> 
> Ted, can you take this patch?  On Android this bug has been causing a NULL
> pointer dereference in ext4_get_encryption_info on boot.  Granted, due to the
> way the code has been moved around it no longer would happen in practice in the
> latest kernel, but we still need something to backport to 4.4, etc.
> 
> Eric

Ping.  Ted, can you take this through the fscrypt tree?  Or should I sent a
similar patch just for 4.4-stable (and earlier), then do something fancier with
smp_store_release, smp_load_acquire, etc. for the latest version?  Personally
I'd prefer starting with the trivial fix, as it can be optimized later.

Eric