CVE-2021-47607

bpf: Fix kernel address leakage in atomic cmpxchg's r0 aux reg

State
Published
Severity
Not scored
Published
Jun 19, 2024
Updated
May 11, 2026
Reserved
May 24, 2024

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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

bpf: Fix kernel address leakage in atomic cmpxchg's r0 aux reg

The implementation of BPF_CMPXCHG on a high level has the following parameters:

.-[old-val] .-[new-val] BPF_R0 = cmpxchg{32,64}(DST_REG + insn->off, BPF_R0, SRC_REG) `-[mem-loc] `-[old-val]

Given a BPF insn can only have two registers (dst, src), the R0 is fixed and used as an auxilliary register for input (old value) as well as output (returning old value from memory location). While the verifier performs a number of safety checks, it misses to reject unprivileged programs where R0 contains a pointer as old value.

Through brute-forcing it takes about ~16sec on my machine to leak a kernel pointer with BPF_CMPXCHG. The PoC is basically probing for kernel addresses by storing the guessed address into the map slot as a scalar, and using the map value pointer as R0 while SRC_REG has a canary value to detect a matching address.

Fix it by checking R0 for pointers, and reject if that's the case for unprivileged programs.

Scores

The record has no CVSS score.

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • 5ffa25502b5ab3d639829a2d1e316cff7f59a41e to before f87a6c160ecc8c7b417d25f508d3f076fe346136Affected
  • 5ffa25502b5ab3d639829a2d1e316cff7f59a41e to before a82fe085f344ef20b452cd5f481010ff96b5c4cdAffected
LinuxLinux
  • 5.12Affected
  • before 5.12Not affected
  • 5.15.11 through 5.15.*Not affected
  • 5.16 and laterNot affected

References

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