Re: [PATCH v2 4/4] xen/netfront: don't trust the backend response data blindly

[Jan Beulich]

On 24.08.2021 12:28, Juergen Gross wrote:
> Today netfront will trust the backend to send only sane response data.
> In order to avoid privilege escalations or crashes in case of malicious
> backends verify the data to be within expected limits. Especially make
> sure that the response always references an outstanding request.
> 
> Note that only the tx queue needs special id handling, as for the rx
> queue the id is equal to the index in the ring page.
> 
> Introduce a new indicator for the device whether it is broken and let
> the device stop working when it is set. Set this indicator in case the
> backend sets any weird data.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Juergen Gross <jgross@xxxxxxxx>

Reviewed-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>
with a small suggestion:

> V2:
> - set the pending flag only just before sending the request (Jan Beulich)
> - reset broken indicator during connect (Jan Beulich)

With this latter adjustment, would it make sense to ...

> @@ -416,6 +440,12 @@ static void xennet_tx_buf_gc(struct netfront_queue *queue)
>  	} while (more_to_do);
>  
>  	xennet_maybe_wake_tx(queue);
> +
> +	return;
> +
> + err:
> +	queue->info->broken = true;
> +	dev_alert(dev, "Disabled for further use\n");

... hint at that behavior here, e.g. by adding "(until reconnect)"?
That way an admin observing this log message will have an immediate
hint at how to get the interface to work again (if so desired).

Jan