Re: arm64/v4.16-rc1: KASAN: use-after-free Read in finish_task_switch

[Catalin Marinas]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 02:22:39PM +0000, Will Deacon wrote:
> Instead, we've come up with a more plausible sequence that can in theory
> happen on a single CPU:
> 
> <task foo calls exit()>
> 
> do_exit
> 	exit_mm
> 		mmgrab(mm);			// foo's mm has count +1
> 		BUG_ON(mm != current->active_mm);
> 		task_lock(current);
> 		current->mm = NULL;
> 		task_unlock(current);
> 
> <irq and ctxsw to kthread>

[...]

> mmdrop(mm);					// foo's mm has count -1
> 
> At this point, we've got an imbalanced count on the mm and could free it
> prematurely as seen in the KASAN log. A subsequent context-switch away
> from foo would therefore result in a use-after-free.

Peter already dismissed an algorithm issue here but I thought I'd give
model checking a go (it only deals with mm_users/mm_count; also added a
heavily simplified exec_mmap() in the loop):

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/cmarinas/kernel-tla.git/tree/ctxsw.tla

As expected, it didn't show any problems (though it does not take memory
ordering into account).

Now, there are lots of other mmget/mmput and mmgrab/mmdrop throughout
the kernel and finding an imbalanced call needs more work.

-- 
Catalin