Re: [PATCH v3] firmware_loader: use kernel credentials when reading firmware

[Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2022 at 04:17:07PM +1000, Thiébaud Weksteen wrote:
> Device drivers may decide to not load firmware when probed to avoid
> slowing down the boot process should the firmware filesystem not be
> available yet. In this case, the firmware loading request may be done
> when a device file associated with the driver is first accessed. The
> credentials of the userspace process accessing the device file may be
> used to validate access to the firmware files requested by the driver.
> Ensure that the kernel assumes the responsibility of reading the
> firmware.
> 
> This was observed on Android for a graphic driver loading their firmware
> when the device file (e.g. /dev/mali0) was first opened by userspace
> (i.e. surfaceflinger). The security context of surfaceflinger was used
> to validate the access to the firmware file (e.g.
> /vendor/firmware/mali.bin).
> 
> Previously, Android configurations were not setting up the
> firmware_class.path command line argument and were relying on the
> userspace fallback mechanism. In this case, the security context of the
> userspace daemon (i.e. ueventd) was consistently used to read firmware
> files. More Android devices are now found to set firmware_class.path
> which gives the kernel the opportunity to read the firmware directly
> (via kernel_read_file_from_path_initns). In this scenario, the current
> process credentials were used, even if unrelated to the loading of the
> firmware file.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Thiébaud Weksteen <tweek@google.com>
> ---

As stated before, should this go to stable kernels?  If so, how far
back?

And you forgot to cc: John?

thanks,

greg k-h