[PATCH bpf-next v7 6/9] selftests/bpf: make cmdline_contains stricter

From: Alexis Lothoré (eBPF Foundation)

Date: Fri Aug 21 2026 - 18:43:02 EST


cmdline_contains is used by BPF selftests to check the presence of
specific kernel commandline parameters, but it currently suffers from
two issues:
- the read commandline isn't NULL terminated right after the read data
but only at the end of the buffer, leaving uninitialized bytes that
are then possibly tokenized
- the comparison of found tokens is done based on the size of found
token. This could lead to too-short-but-matching tokens to wrongly
match the search pattern.

Enforce stricter checks in cmdline_contains to avoid accidental matches.

Fixes: 399f6185a1c0 ("selftests/bpf: Fix selftests broken by mitigations=off")
Signed-off-by: Alexis Lothoré (eBPF Foundation) <alexis.lothore@xxxxxxxxxxx>
---
Changes in v7:
- add missing Fixes tag
- drop unneeded size check, already done by strcmp
---
tools/testing/selftests/bpf/unpriv_helpers.c | 9 +++++----
1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/tools/testing/selftests/bpf/unpriv_helpers.c b/tools/testing/selftests/bpf/unpriv_helpers.c
index f997d7ec8fd0..9dadcacaef0c 100644
--- a/tools/testing/selftests/bpf/unpriv_helpers.c
+++ b/tools/testing/selftests/bpf/unpriv_helpers.c
@@ -72,8 +72,8 @@ static int config_contains(const char *pat)

static bool cmdline_contains(const char *pat)
{
+ int fd, cnt, ret = false;
char cmdline[4096], *c;
- int fd, ret = false;

fd = open("/proc/cmdline", O_RDONLY);
if (fd < 0) {
@@ -81,14 +81,15 @@ static bool cmdline_contains(const char *pat)
return false;
}

- if (read(fd, cmdline, sizeof(cmdline) - 1) < 0) {
+ cnt = read(fd, cmdline, sizeof(cmdline) - 1);
+ if (cnt < 0) {
perror("read /proc/cmdline");
goto out;
}

- cmdline[sizeof(cmdline) - 1] = '\0';
+ cmdline[cnt] = '\0';
for (c = strtok(cmdline, " \n"); c; c = strtok(NULL, " \n")) {
- if (strncmp(c, pat, strlen(c)))
+ if (strcmp(c, pat))
continue;
ret = true;
break;

--
2.55.0