CVE-2021-47587

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

net: systemport: Add global locking for descriptor lifecycle

The descriptor list is a shared resource across all of the transmit queues, and the locking mechanism used today only protects concurrency across a given transmit queue between the transmit and reclaiming. This creates an opportunity for the SYSTEMPORT hardware to work on corrupted descriptors if we have multiple producers at once which is the case when using multiple transmit queues.

This was particularly noticeable when using multiple flows/transmit queues and it showed up in interesting ways in that UDP packets would get a correct UDP header checksum being calculated over an incorrect packet length. Similarly TCP packets would get an equally correct checksum computed by the hardware over an incorrect packet length.

The SYSTEMPORT hardware maintains an internal descriptor list that it re-arranges when the driver produces a new descriptor anytime it writes to the WRITE_PORT_{HI,LO} registers, there is however some delay in the hardware to re-organize its descriptors and it is possible that concurrent TX queues eventually break this internal allocation scheme to the point where the length/status part of the descriptor gets used for an incorrect data buffer.

The fix is to impose a global serialization for all TX queues in the short section where we are writing to the WRITE_PORT_{HI,LO} registers which solves the corruption even with multiple concurrent TX queues being used.

Weakness

The product does not properly acquire or release a lock on a resource, leading to unexpected resource state changes and behaviors.

Affected Software

Extended Description

Locking is a type of synchronization behavior that ensures that multiple independently-operating processes or threads do not interfere with each other when accessing the same resource. All processes/threads are expected to follow the same steps for locking. If these steps are not followed precisely - or if no locking is done at all - then another process/thread could modify the shared resource in a way that is not visible or predictable to the original process. This can lead to data or memory corruption, denial of service, etc.

Potential Mitigations

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/25.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/26.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/27.html

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/595a684fa6f23b21958379a18cfa83862c73c2e1
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6e1011cd183faae8daff275c72444edcdfe0d473
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8b8e6e782456f1ce02a7ae914bbd5b1053f0b034
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8ed2f5d08d6e59f8c78b2869bfb95d0be32c094c
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c675256a7f131f5ba3f331efb715e8f31ea0e392
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/de57f62f76450b934de8203711bdc4f7953c3421
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/eb4687c7442942e115420a30185f8d83faf37696
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f3fde37d3f0d429f0fcce214cb52588a9e21260e