Re: [PATCH 1/2] ras: fix an off-by-one error in __find_elem()

Cong Wang
2019-04-16T23:19:11Z

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 3:18 PM Luck, Tony <tony.luck@intel.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 11:07:26AM +0200, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 06:20:00PM -0700, Cong Wang wrote:
> > > ce_arr.array[] is always within the range [0, ce_arr.n-1].
> > > However, the binary search code in __find_elem() uses ce_arr.n
> > > as the maximum index, which could lead to an off-by-one
> > > out-of-bound access when the element after the last is exactly
> > > the one just got deleted, that is, 'min' returned to caller as
> > > 'ce_arr.n'.
> >
> > Sorry, I don't follow.
> >
> > There's a debugfs interface in /sys/kernel/debug/ras/cec/ with which you
> > can input random PFNs and test the thing.
> >
> > Show me pls how this can happen with an example.
>
> The array of previously seen pfn values is one page.
>
> The problem case occurs when we've seen enough distinct
> errors that we have filled every entry, then we try to
> look up a pfn that is larger that any seen before.
>
> The loop:
>
> while (min < max) {
> ...
> }
>
> will terminate with "min" set to MAX_ELEMS. Then we
> execute:
>
> this_pfn = PFN(ca->array[min]);
>
> which references beyond the end of the space allocated
> for ca->array.

Exactly.

>
> Probably won't crash, but we will read a garbage value
> from whatever memory is allocated next.

It will eventually crash, this can be proved. :)

>
> Chances are high that the test:
>
> if (this_pfn == pfn)
>
> won't find that the garbage value matches the pfn that
> we were looking for ... so we will likley be lucky and
> not do anything too dumb. But we shouldn't just cross
> our fingers and hope.
>
> Fix looks mostly OK, but we should probably move the
>
> if (to)
> *to = min;
>
> inside the new
>
> if (min < ca->n) {
> ...
> }
>
> clause.

No, we can't, in case of -ENOKEY, we still have to save the index
for caller to insert it at the end of the array, therefore *to must be
always saved.

Thanks.