In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
soc: qcom: pmic_glink_altmode: fix drm bridge use-after-free
A recent DRM series purporting to simplify support for transparent bridges and handling of probe deferrals ironically exposed a use-after-free issue on pmic_glink_altmode probe deferral.
This has manifested itself as the display subsystem occasionally failing to initialise and NULL-pointer dereferences during boot of machines like the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s.
Specifically, the dp-hpd bridge is currently registered before all resources have been acquired which means that it can also be deregistered on probe deferrals.
In the meantime there is a race window where the new aux bridge driver (or PHY driver previously) may have looked up the dp-hpd bridge and stored a (non-reference-counted) pointer to the bridge which is about to be deallocated.
When the display controller is later initialised, this triggers a use-after-free when attaching the bridges:
dp -> aux -> dp-hpd (freed)
which may, for example, result in the freed bridge failing to attach:
[drm:drm_bridge_attach [drm]] *ERROR* failed to attach bridge /soc@0/phy@88eb000 to encoder TMDS-31: -16
or a NULL-pointer dereference:
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 0000000000000000
...
Call trace:
drm_bridge_attach+0x70/0x1a8 [drm]
drm_aux_bridge_attach+0x24/0x38 [aux_bridge]
drm_bridge_attach+0x80/0x1a8 [drm]
dp_bridge_init+0xa8/0x15c [msm]
msm_dp_modeset_init+0x28/0xc4 [msm]
The DRM bridge implementation is clearly fragile and implicitly built on the assumption that bridges may never go away. In this case, the fix is to move the bridge registration in the pmic_glink_altmode driver to after all resources have been looked up.
Incidentally, with the new dp-hpd bridge implementation, which registers child devices, this is also a requirement due to a long-standing issue in driver core that can otherwise lead to a probe deferral loop (see commit fbc35b45f9f6 (Add documentation on meaning of -EPROBE_DEFER)).
[DB: slightly fixed commit message by adding the word commit]
Referencing memory after it has been freed can cause a program to crash, use unexpected values, or execute code.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linux_kernel | Linux | 6.3 (including) | 6.6.23 (excluding) |
| Linux_kernel | Linux | 6.7 (including) | 6.7.11 (excluding) |
The use of previously-freed memory can have any number of adverse consequences, ranging from the corruption of valid data to the execution of arbitrary code, depending on the instantiation and timing of the flaw. The simplest way data corruption may occur involves the system’s reuse of the freed memory. Use-after-free errors have two common and sometimes overlapping causes:
In this scenario, the memory in question is allocated to another pointer validly at some point after it has been freed. The original pointer to the freed memory is used again and points to somewhere within the new allocation. As the data is changed, it corrupts the validly used memory; this induces undefined behavior in the process. If the newly allocated data happens to hold a class, in C++ for example, various function pointers may be scattered within the heap data. If one of these function pointers is overwritten with an address to valid shellcode, execution of arbitrary code can be achieved.