RE: CVE-2014-8159 kernel: infiniband: uverbs: unprotected physical memory access

Shachar Raindel
2015-04-02T07:52:17Z

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roland Dreier [mailto:roland@purestorage.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2015 8:28 PM
> To: Shachar Raindel
> Cc: oss-security@lists.openwall.com; <linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org>
> (linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org); stable@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: Re: CVE-2014-8159 kernel: infiniband: uverbs: unprotected
> physical memory access
>
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 10:39 AM, Shachar Raindel <raindel@mellanox.com>
> wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 18:30:32 +0200
> > Subject: [PATCH] IB/core: Prevent integer overflow in ib_umem_get
> address arithmetic
>
> Just so we're clear, this bug has been known since January 4, and it's
> getting sent upstream now?
>

This bug has been known since January, yes. To reduce the window of
vulnerability, we privately reported it to major distributions first,
aligning everyone on the same release date. Such synchronization takes
time. Given that the bug was not, to the best of our knowledge,
exploited in the wild, we believed that 3 months of embargo is not
exuberated. This is a common practice in the security industry, called
"responsible disclosure."

Following the kernel security bugs policy [1], we reported it to
the kernel security contacts few days before making the issue public.
Few days after issue became public, we published a clear report to all
of the relevant mailing lists.

> I assume we want it in 4.0 and -stable?

Yes. Should be applied ASAP to all kernels that contain uverbs.
We put some effort to make sure the patch will apply cleanly on all
historical versions of the kernel, so backporting should be simple.

Thanks,
--Shachar

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SecurityBugs