The VNC server must throttle data sent to the client to prevent the 'output'
buffer size growing without bound, if the client stops reading data off the
socket (either maliciously or due to stalled/slow network connection).
The current throttling is very crude because it simply checks whether the
output buffer offset is zero. This check must be disabled if audio capture is
enabled, because when streaming audio the output buffer offset will rarely be
zero due to queued audio data, and so this would starve framebuffer updates.
As a result, the VNC client can cause QEMU to allocate arbitrary amounts of RAM.
They can first start something in the guest that triggers lots of framebuffer
updates eg play a youtube video. Then enable audio capture, and simply never
read data back from the server. This can easily make QEMU's VNC server send
buffer consume 100MB of RAM per second, until the OOM killer starts reaping
processes (hopefully the rogue QEMU process, but it might pick others...).
To address this we make the throttling more intelligent, so we can throttle
when audio capture is active too. To determine how to throttle incremental
updates or audio data, we calculate a size threshold. Normally the threshold is
the approximate number of bytes associated with a single complete framebuffer
update. ie width * height * bytes per pixel. We'll send incremental updates
until we hit this threshold, at which point we'll stop sending updates until
data has been written to the wire, causing the output buffer offset to fall
back below the threshold.
If audio capture is enabled, we increase the size of the threshold to also
allow for upto 1 seconds worth of audio data samples. ie nchannels * bytes
per sample * frequency. This allows the output buffer to have a mixture of
incremental framebuffer updates and audio data queued, but once the threshold
is exceeded, audio data will be dropped and incremental updates will be
throttled.
This unbounded memory growth affects all VNC server configurations supported by
QEMU, with no workaround possible. The mitigating factor is that it can only be
triggered by a client that has authenticated with the VNC server, and who is
able to trigger a large quantity of framebuffer updates or audio samples from
the guest OS. Mostly they'll just succeed in getting the OOM killer to kill
their own QEMU process, but its possible other processes can get taken out as
collateral damage.
This is a more general variant of the similar unbounded memory usage flaw in
the websockets server, that was previously assigned CVE-2017-15268, and fixed
in 2.11 by:
commit a7b20a8efa
Author: Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@redhat.com>
Date: Mon Oct 9 14:43:42 2017 +0100
io: monitor encoutput buffer size from websocket GSource
This new general memory usage flaw has been assigned CVE-2017-15124, and is
partially fixed by this patch.
Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Darren Kenny <darren.kenny@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Marc-André Lureau <marcandre.lureau@redhat.com>
Message-id: 20171218191228.31018-10-berrange@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>
e2b72cb6e0