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

Cong Wang
2019-04-16T17:01:56Z

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 2:07 AM Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> 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.

Sorry for the confusion here. Let me try to make it clear with
the example I wrote down on a paper before submitting this patch.

Imagine we have the ca->array[] with ca->n = 4, the elements inside
are 0, 1, 2, 3. We are trying to find 5 in this array. (This is just to
simplify the following iterations of the while loop.)

So in this specific scenario, without my patch we have the following
inside the while loop:

min = 0, max = 4
tmp = 2
min = 3, max = 4
tmp = 3
min = 4, max = 4
break

It is okay to have min==4 after this loop as we still need to check
if array[4] is whether 5. The problem is array[4] could really be 5
before we delete array[4], so 4 could be returned to caller. And,
after that, 4 could be passed to del_elem() inside cec_add_elem(),
then the if check inside is passed as it is an unsigned operation,
then the memmove() accesses index 5...

To actually crash the kernel, we have to replace 4 with MAX_ELEMS
in the above example, kernel would crash either when reading
array[MAX_ELEMS] or in the memmove().

>
> 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.
>

Let me try if I can figure out how to add and remove PFN's.

Thanks.