Re: [PATCH] audit: avoid dropping live tree ref on fsnotify rule autoremove

[Paul Moore]

On Aug 11, 2026 =?UTF-8?q?J=C3=A9r=C3=A9my=20Jean?= <Jeremy.Jean@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> audit_del_rule() is used for both netlink deletion templates and internal
> fsnotify autoremove.  The former passes a parsed template which owns a
> temporary tree reference; the latter passes the installed entry itself.
> 
> The unconditional audit_put_tree() at the end of audit_del_rule() assumes
> the template case.  For mixed AUDIT_DIR plus AUDIT_EXE rules, an fsnotify
> autoremove event therefore drops the installed rule's live tree reference.
> Repeating this across rules sharing the same tree can free the tree while
> another rule still references it, and a later autoremove dereferences the
> freed pathname while comparing rules.
> 
> Move the temporary-tree put to audit_rule_change(), the caller that owns
> deletion templates.  Keep it in the AUDIT_DEL_RULE cleanup so both
> successful deletion and -ENOENT still release the parser-owned tree.
> 
> Fixes: 34d99af52ad4 ("audit: implement audit by executable")
> Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
> Signed-off-by: Jérémy Jean <Jeremy.Jean@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Reviewed-by: Ricardo Robaina <rrobaina@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Tested-by: Ricardo Robaina <rrobaina@xxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  kernel/auditfilter.c | 6 ++----
>  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

Thanks for finding this and submitting a fix!

This looks good to me too, so I'm going to merge this, but instead of the
normal audit/stable-7.2 branch, I'm going to merge this into the audit/dev
branch since we are likely only a few days away from a v7.2 release and I
think it would be good to get some additional testing.  I am going to tag
this commit with a stable tag so it will/should get backported once it
lands in Linus' tree.

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paul-moore.com