CVE-2023-53440

01/Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: nilfs2: fix sysfs interface lifetime The current nilfs2 sysfs support has issues with the timing of creation and deletion of sysfs entries, potentially leading to null pointer dereferences, use-after-free, and lockdep warnings. Some of the sysfs attributes for nilfs2 per-filesystem instance refer to metadata file "cpfile", "sufile", or "dat", but nilfs_sysfs_create_device_group that creates those attributes is executed before the inodes for these metadata files are loaded, and nilfs_sysfs_delete_device_group which deletes these sysfs entries is called after releasing their metadata file inodes. Therefore, access to some of these sysfs attributes may occur outside of the lifetime of these metadata files, resulting in inode NULL pointer dereferences or use-after-free. In addition, the call to nilfs_sysfs_create_device_group() is made during the locking period of the semaphore "ns_sem" of nilfs object, so the shrinker call caused by the memory allocation for the sysfs entries, may derive lock dependencies "ns_sem" -> (shrinker) -> "locks acquired in nilfs_evict_inode()". Since nilfs2 may acquire "ns_sem" deep in the call stack holding other locks via its error handler __nilfs_error(), this causes lockdep to report circular locking. This is a false positive and no circular locking actually occurs as no inodes exist yet when nilfs_sysfs_create_device_group() is called. Fortunately, the lockdep warnings can be resolved by simply moving the call to nilfs_sysfs_create_device_group() out of "ns_sem". This fixes these sysfs issues by revising where the device's sysfs interface is created/deleted and keeping its lifetime within the lifetime of the metadata files above.

02/Affected products

linux: linux kernel

03/References8

• git.kernel.org/stable/c/1942ccb7d95f287a312fcbabfa8bc9ba501b1953 Patch
• git.kernel.org/stable/c/3dbee84bf9e3273c4bb9ca6fc18ff22fba23dd24 Patch
• git.kernel.org/stable/c/42560f9c92cc43dce75dbf06cc0d840dced39b12 Patch
• git.kernel.org/stable/c/5fe0ea141fbb887d407f1bf572ebf24427480d5c Patch
• git.kernel.org/stable/c/83b16a60e413148685739635901937e2f16a7873 Patch
• git.kernel.org/stable/c/d20dcec8f326deb77b6688f8441e014045dac457 Patch
• git.kernel.org/stable/c/d540aea451ab5489777a8156560f1388449b3109 Patch
• git.kernel.org/stable/c/daf4eb3a908b108279b60172d2f176e70d2df875 Patch