Re: [PATCH] proc: prevent accessing /proc/<PID>/environ until it's ready

[Andrew Morton]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 21:04:18 +0200 Mathias Krause <minipli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> If /proc/<PID>/environ gets read before the envp[] array is fully set
> up in create_{aout,elf,elf_fdpic,flat}_tables(), we might end up trying
> to read more bytes than are actually written, as env_start will already
> be set but env_end will still be zero, making the range calculation
> underflow, allowing to read beyond the end of what has been written.
> 
> Fix this as it is done for /proc/<PID>/cmdline by testing env_end for
> zero. It is, apparently, intentionally set last in create_*_tables().
> 
> This bug was found by the PaX size_overflow plugin that detected the
> arithmetic underflow of 'this_len = env_end - (env_start + src)' when
> env_end is still zero.

So what are the implications of this?  From my reading, a craftily
constructed application could occasionally read arbitrarily large
amounts of kernel memory?