Re: [PATCH] Audit: fix handling of 'strings' with NULL characters

Andrew Morton
2008-09-12T00:10:17Z

On Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:48:39 -0400
Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com> wrote:

> currently audit_log_n_untrustedstring() uses
> audit_string_contains_control() to check if the 'string' has any control
> characters. If the 'string' has an embedded NULL
> audit_string_contains_control() will return that the data has no control
> characters and will then pass the string to audit_log_n_string with the
> total length, not the length up to the first NULL. audit_log_n_string
> does a memcpy of the entire length and so the actual audit record
> emitted may then contain a NULL and then whatever random memory is after
> the NULL.
>
> Since we want to log the entire octet stream (if we can't trust the data
> to be a string we can't trust that a NULL isn't actually a part of it)
> we should just consider NULL as a control character. If the caller is
> certain they want to stop at the first NULL they should be using
> audit_log_untrustedstring.
>
> Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
>
> ---
>
> Miloslav, this is also going to take care of nulls in the TTY_AUDIT_USER
> message from userspace. Is it going to be common to have control
> characters on that code path as well? Do you want to change
> audit_receive_msg() to also use the hex encoding directly instead of the
> _n_untrustedstring interface?

OK, I am now officially confused about the relationship between this
patch, Miloslav's two patches and 2.6.27/2.6.26/2.6.25.

Think I'll go into hiding for a while - please wake us up when it's all
sorted out.