So I spent a while pounding my head against my monitor trying to figure
out the vmsplice() vulnerability - how could a failure to check for
*read* access turn into a root exploit? It turns out that it's a buffer
overflow problem which is made easy by the way get_user_pages() is
coded.
In particular, "len" is a signed int, and it is only checked at the
*end* of a do {} while() loop. So, if it is passed in as zero, the loop
will execute once and decrement len to -1. At that point, the loop will
proceed until the next invalid address is found; in the process, it will
likely overflow the pages array passed in to get_user_pages().
I think that, if get_user_pages() has been asked to grab zero pages,
that's what it should do. Thus this patch; it is, among other things,
enough to block the (already fixed) root exploit and any others which
might be lurking in similar code. I also think that the number of pages
should be unsigned, but changing the prototype of this function probably
requires some more careful review.
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
900cf086fd