Re: [PATCH RESEND] kthread, tracing: Don't expose half-written comm when creating kthreads

[Snild Dolkow]

On 07/23/2018 06:41 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Jul 2018 17:49:36 +0200
> Snild Dolkow <snild@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Any issues with the commit message? Reading it back again now, it doesn't
>> seem quite as clear as when I wrote it.
> 
> Yeah, I think it does need some updates:
> 
>> There was a window for racing when task->comm was being written. The
> 
> It would be nice to explain this race window in more detail.
> 
I hope the following is more clear:

kthread, tracing: Don't expose half-written comm when creating kthreads

There is a window for racing when printing directly to task->comm,
allowing other threads to see a non-terminated string. The vsnprintf
function fills the buffer, counts the truncated chars, then finally
writes the \0 at the end.

	creator                         other
	vsnprintf:
	  fill (not terminated)
	  count the rest                read/use comm
	  write \0

The consequences depend on how 'other' uses the string. In our case,
it was copied into the tracing system's saved cmdlines, a buffer of
adjacent TASK_COMM_LEN-byte buffers (note the 'n' where 0 should be):

	crash-arm64> x/1024s savedcmd->saved_cmdlines | grep 'evenk'
	0xffffffd5b3818640:     "irq/497-pwr_evenkworker/u16:12"

...and a strcpy out of there would cause stack corruption:

	[224761.522292] Kernel panic - not syncing: stack-protector:
	    Kernel stack is corrupted in: ffffff9bf9783c78

	crash-arm64> kbt | grep 'comm\|trace_print_context'
	#6  0xffffff9bf9783c78 in trace_print_context+0x18c(+396)
	      comm (char [16]) =  "irq/497-pwr_even"

	crash-arm64> rd 0xffffffd4d0e17d14 8
	ffffffd4d0e17d14:  2f71726900000000 5f7277702d373934   ....irq/497-pwr_
	ffffffd4d0e17d24:  726f776b6e657665 3a3631752f72656b   evenkworker/u16:
	ffffffd4d0e17d34:  f9780248ff003231 cede60e0ffffff9b   12..H.x......`..
	ffffffd4d0e17d44:  cede60c8ffffffd4 00000fffffffffd4   .....`..........

The workaround in e09e28671 (use strlcpy in __trace_find_cmdline) was
likely needed because of this same bug.

Solved by vsnprintf:ing to a local buffer, then using set_task_comm().
This way, there won't be a window where comm is not terminated.


//Snild