From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Reply-To: kernel-hardening@lists.openwall.com Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2011 14:13:01 -0700 From: Andrew Morton Message-Id: <20110705141301.0d3594e0.akpm@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <20110704201339.GA5645@albatros> References: <20110703103925.GA2283@albatros> <20110704201339.GA5645@albatros> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [kernel-hardening] Re: [PATCH v2] proc: fix a race in do_io_accounting() To: Vasiliy Kulikov Cc: Linus Torvalds , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk, rientjes@google.com, wilsons@start.ca, security@kernel.org, kernel-hardening@lists.openwall.com List-ID: On Tue, 5 Jul 2011 00:13:39 +0400 Vasiliy Kulikov wrote: > There is a ptrace_may_access() check in do_io_accounting() to prevent > gathering information of setuid'ed and similar binaries. However, there > is a race against execve(). Holding task->signal->cred_guard_mutex > while gathering the information should protect against the race. > > The order of locking is similar to the one inside of > ptrace_attach(): first goes cred_guard_mutex, then lock_task_sighand(). > > v2 - use mutex_lock_killable() instead of mutex_lock(). > > Signed-off-by: Vasiliy Kulikov > Cc: stable@kernel.org If a patch is to be backported into -stable then its changelog had better explain why such a thing is needed. This one doesn't. Please provide a full description of the conseuqences of the bug. One which will permit the -stable maintainers to understand why they're merging the patch, and one which will help distribution maintainers decide whether they want to merge it as well.