CVE-2022-49195

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

net: dsa: fix panic on shutdown if multi-chip tree failed to probe

DSA probing is atypical because a tree of devices must probe all at once, so out of N switches which call dsa_tree_setup_routing_table() during probe, for (N - 1) of them, complete will return false and they will exit probing early. The Nth switch will set up the whole tree on their behalf.

The implication is that for (N - 1) switches, the driver binds to the device successfully, without doing anything. When the driver is bound, the ->shutdown() method may run. But if the Nth switch has failed to initialize the tree, there is nothing to do for the (N - 1) driver instances, since the slave devices have not been created, etc. Moreover, dsa_switch_shutdown() expects that the calling @ds has been in fact initialized, so it jumps at dereferencing the various data structures, which is incorrect.

Avoid the ensuing NULL pointer dereferences by simply checking whether the Nth switch has previously set ds->setup = true for the switch which is currently shutting down. The entire setup is serialized under dsa2_mutex which we already hold.

Weakness

The product dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid but is NULL.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8fd36358ce82382519b50b05f437493e1e00c4a9
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/95df5cd5a446df6738d2d45872e08594819080e4
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b6e668ff43ebd87ccc8a19e5481345c428672295
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b864d5350c18bea9369d0bdd9e7eb6f6172cc283