Re: BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference in mem_serial_out

Greg KH
2019-12-14T07:55:22Z

On Sat, Dec 14, 2019 at 09:48:29AM +0900, Tetsuo Handa wrote:
> On 2019/12/14 1:07, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 11:31:08PM +0900, Tetsuo Handa wrote:
> >> On 2019/12/13 19:00, Dmitry Vyukov wrote:
> >>> Easier said than done. "normal user of the serial port" is not really
> >>> a thing in Linux, right? You either have CAP_SYS_ADMIN or not, that's
> >>> not per-device...
> >>> As far as I remember +Tetsuo proposed a config along the lines of
> >>> "restrict only things that legitimately cause damage under a fuzzer
> >>> workload", e.g. freezing filesystems, disabling console output, etc.
> >>> This may be another candidate. But I can't find where that proposal is
> >>> now.
> >>
> >> That suggestion got no response for two months.
> >>
> >> https://lkml.kernel.org/r/3e4e2b6b-7828-54ab-cf28-db1a396d7e20@i-love.sakura.ne.jp
> >>
> >> Unless we add such kernel config option to upstream kernels, it will become
> >> a whack-a-mole game.
> >
> > It will be a whack-a-mole game no matter what.
> >
> > Yes, /dev/mem/ makes no sense to fuzz. Neither does other things (like
> > serial port memory addresses.)
>
> /dev/mem makes sense to fuzz. Ditto for other things.

What? What are you going to find if you randomly start to write to
/dev/mem? How are we supposed to "fix" that?

> > You just will have a list of things that you "do not fuzz as these are
> > dangerous". Nothing new here, any os will have that.
>
> The list of kernel config options will become too complicated to maintain.
> If we can have one kernel config option, we can avoid maintaining
> the list of kernel config options (which keeps changing over time).

Use the newly added security_locked_down() call, that gives you a great
indication that root can cause problems for those things.

And it's not a config thing, it's a functionality thing within features,
as is explicitly shown by this very thread for the serial port memory
location.

thanks,

greg k-h