Vulnerabilities > CVE-2024-43863 - Improper Locking vulnerability in Linux Kernel
Summary
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: drm/vmwgfx: Fix a deadlock in dma buf fence polling Introduce a version of the fence ops that on release doesn't remove the fence from the pending list, and thus doesn't require a lock to fix poll->fence wait->fence unref deadlocks. vmwgfx overwrites the wait callback to iterate over the list of all fences and update their status, to do that it holds a lock to prevent the list modifcations from other threads. The fence destroy callback both deletes the fence and removes it from the list of pending fences, for which it holds a lock. dma buf polling cb unrefs a fence after it's been signaled: so the poll calls the wait, which signals the fences, which are being destroyed. The destruction tries to acquire the lock on the pending fences list which it can never get because it's held by the wait from which it was called. Old bug, but not a lot of userspace apps were using dma-buf polling interfaces. Fix those, in particular this fixes KDE stalls/deadlock.
Vulnerable Configurations
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Leveraging Race Conditions This attack targets a race condition occurring when multiple processes access and manipulate the same resource concurrently and the outcome of the execution depends on the particular order in which the access takes place. The attacker can leverage a race condition by "running the race", modifying the resource and modifying the normal execution flow. For instance a race condition can occur while accessing a file, the attacker can trick the system by replacing the original file with his version and cause the system to read the malicious file.
- Leveraging Race Conditions via Symbolic Links This attack leverages the use of symbolic links (Symlinks) in order to write to sensitive files. An attacker can create a Symlink link to a target file not otherwise accessible to her. When the privileged program tries to create a temporary file with the same name as the Symlink link, it will actually write to the target file pointed to by the attackers' Symlink link. If the attacker can insert malicious content in the temporary file she will be writing to the sensitive file by using the Symlink. The race occurs because the system checks if the temporary file exists, then creates the file. The attacker would typically create the Symlink during the interval between the check and the creation of the temporary file.
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/9e20d028d8d1deb1e7fed18f22ffc01669cf3237
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3b933b16c996af8adb6bc1b5748a63dfb41a82bc
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a8943969f9ead2fd3044fc826140a21622ef830e
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c98ab18b9f315ff977c2c65d7c71298ef98be8e3
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e58337100721f3cc0c7424a18730e4f39844934f