CVE-2023-53178

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

mm: fix zswap writeback race condition

The zswap writeback mechanism can cause a race condition resulting in memory corruption, where a swapped out page gets swapped in with data that was written to a different page.

The race unfolds like this:

1. a page with data A and swap offset X is stored in zswap
2. page A is removed off the LRU by zpool driver for writeback in zswap-shrink work, data for A is mapped by zpool driver
3. user space program faults and invalidates page entry A, offset X is considered free
4. kswapd stores page B at offset X in zswap (zswap could also be full, if so, page B would then be IOed to X, then skip step 5.)
5. entry A is replaced by B in tree->rbroot, this doesnt affect the local reference held by zswap-shrink work
6. zswap-shrink work writes back A at X, and frees zswap entry A
7. swapin of slot X brings A in memory instead of B

The fix: Once the swap page cache has been allocated (case ZSWAP_SWAPCACHE_NEW), zswap-shrink work just checks that the local zswap_entry reference is still the same as the one in the tree. If its not the same it means that its either been invalidated or replaced, in both cases the writeback is aborted because the local entry contains stale data.

Reproducer: I originally found this by running stress overnight to validate my work on the zswap writeback mechanism, it manifested after hours on my test machine. The key to make it happen is having zswap writebacks, so whatever setup pumps /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/written_back_pages should do the trick.

In order to reproduce this faster on a vm, I setup a system with ~100M of available memory and a 500M swap file, then running stress --vm 1 --vm-bytes 300000000 --vm-stride 4000 makes it happen in matter of tens of minutes. One can speed things up even more by swinging /sys/module/zswap/parameters/max_pool_percent up and down between, say, 20 and 1; this makes it reproduce in tens of seconds. Its crucial to set --vm-stride to something other than 4096 otherwise stress wont realize that memory has been corrupted because all pages would have the same data.

Weakness

The product contains a concurrent code sequence that requires temporary, exclusive access to a shared resource, but a timing window exists in which the shared resource can be modified by another code sequence operating concurrently.

Affected Software

Extended Description

A race condition occurs within concurrent environments, and it is effectively a property of a code sequence. Depending on the context, a code sequence may be in the form of a function call, a small number of instructions, a series of program invocations, etc. A race condition violates these properties, which are closely related:

A race condition exists when an “interfering code sequence” can still access the shared resource, violating exclusivity. The interfering code sequence could be “trusted” or “untrusted.” A trusted interfering code sequence occurs within the product; it cannot be modified by the attacker, and it can only be invoked indirectly. An untrusted interfering code sequence can be authored directly by the attacker, and typically it is external to the vulnerable product.

Potential Mitigations

• Minimize the usage of shared resources in order to remove as much complexity as possible from the control flow and to reduce the likelihood of unexpected conditions occurring.
• Additionally, this will minimize the amount of synchronization necessary and may even help to reduce the likelihood of a denial of service where an attacker may be able to repeatedly trigger a critical section (CWE-400).

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/26.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/29.html

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/04fc7816089c5a32c29a04ec94b998e219dfb946
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2cab13f500a6333bd2b853783ac76be9e4956f8a
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ba700ea13bf0105a4773c654f7d3bef8adb64ab2