Re: [PATCH 0/1] coredump: Fix null pointer dereference when kernel.core_pattern is "|"

From: Sudip Mukherjee
Date: Sat Mar 14 2020 - 22:20:38 EST


Hi Paul,

On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 08:28:10AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Tue, 2020-03-10 at 11:34 +1300, Matthew Ruffell wrote:
>
> > Can I please get some feedback on this patch? Would be good to clear
> > up the null pointer dereference.

I could reproduce the problem very easily, though the core_pattern is
not supposed to be used that way. Only "|" is invalid core_pattern. But
in anycase I think the kernel should have a check for this invalid
usecase.

>
> I had a thought about it, instead of using strlen, what about checking
> that the first item in the array is NUL or not? In the normal case this
> should be faster than strlen.

Why are you checking the corename in do_coredump() after it has done
almost everything? It can be very easily checked in format_corename().
Something like the following:

diff --git a/fs/coredump.c b/fs/coredump.c
index b1ea7dfbd149..d25bad2ed061 100644
--- a/fs/coredump.c
+++ b/fs/coredump.c
@@ -211,6 +211,8 @@ static int format_corename(struct core_name *cn, struct coredump_params *cprm,
return -ENOMEM;
(*argv)[(*argc)++] = 0;
++pat_ptr;
+ if (!(*pat_ptr))
+ return -ENOMEM;
}

/* Repeat as long as we have more pattern to process and more output


--
Regards
Sudip