In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: eventfs: Use children field for rcu head and add memory barriers When an eventfs inode is freed, it sets ei->is_freed and then uses its ei->list to add it to the srcu …

Overview

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

eventfs: Use children field for rcu head and add memory barriers

When an eventfs inode is freed, it sets ei->is_freed and then uses its ei->list to add it to the srcu link list as the list field is a union with the rcu list head. As the ei->list is used to iterate over an SRCU protected list without taking the eventfs_mutex, there's nothing stopping the iteration over that list to see the ei->rcu instead of the ei->list and it will read a corrupt target.

To fix this, change the union of the rcu list head with the children list. On freeing the eventfs inode, set the is_free and execute a smp_wmb() before adding the eventfs inode to the SRCU list.

On iteration of the ei->children list, at the start, execute a smp_rmb() and then read the is_freed of the ei to see if the children list is still valid. If is_freed is set, then the ei_child read is not valid and the loop should exit immediately.

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.