Re: [syzbot] general protection fault in security_inode_getattr

Tetsuo Handa
2022-10-17T14:30:17Z

On 2022/10/16 23:52, Paul Moore wrote:
> It doesn't look like this is a problem with
> security_inode_getattr()/d_backing_inode() as it appears that the
> passed path struct pointer has a bogus/NULL path->dentry pointer and
> to the best of my knowledge it would appear that vfs_getattr() (the
> caller) requires a valid path->dentry value.
>
> Looking quickly at the code, I wonder if there is something wonky
> going on in the overlayfs code, specifically ovl_copy_up_flags() and
> ovl_copy_up_one() as they have to play a number of tricks to handle
> the transparent overlays and copy up operations. I'm not an overlayfs
> expert, but that seems like a good place to start digging further into
> this.

Right. This is a bug in overlayfs code. Probably due to some race condition,
ovl_copy_up_flags() is calling ovl_copy_up_one() with "next" dentry with
"struct ovl_entry"->numlower == 0. As a result, ovl_path_lower() from
ovl_copy_up_one() fills ctx.lowerpath with NULLs, and vfs_getattr() gets
surprised by ctx.lowerpath.dentry == NULL.

If we can't avoid selecting a dentry with "struct ovl_entry"->numlower == 0 using
some lock, I guess that we would need to use a workaround suggested by Hillf Danton
at https://groups.google.com/g/syzkaller-bugs/c/xDcxFKSppfE/m/b38Tv7LoAAAJ .