CVE-2023-52456

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

serial: imx: fix tx statemachine deadlock

When using the serial port as RS485 port, the tx statemachine is used to control the RTS pin to drive the RS485 transceiver TX_EN pin. When the TTY port is closed in the middle of a transmission (for instance during userland application crash), imx_uart_shutdown disables the interface and disables the Transmission Complete interrupt. afer that, imx_uart_stop_tx bails on an incomplete transmission, to be retriggered by the TC interrupt. This interrupt is disabled and therefore the tx statemachine never transitions out of SEND. The statemachine is in deadlock now, and the TX_EN remains low, making the interface useless.

imx_uart_stop_tx now checks for incomplete transmission AND whether TC interrupts are enabled before bailing to be retriggered. This makes sure the state machine handling is reached, and is properly set to WAIT_AFTER_SEND.

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/63ee7be01a3f7d28b1ea8b8d7944f12bb7b0ed06
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6e04a9d30509fb53ba6df5d655ed61d607a7cfda
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/763cd68746317b5d746dc2649a3295c1efb41181
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/78d60dae9a0c9f09aa3d6477c94047df2fe6f7b0
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/9a662d06c22ddfa371958c2071dc350436be802b
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ff168d4fdb0e1ba35fb413a749b3d6cce918ec19