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authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org>2006-11-04 10:06:02 -0800
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org>2006-11-04 10:06:02 -0800
commit45c18b0bb579b5c1b89f8c99f1b6ffa4c586ba08 (patch)
tree2dbd334c763232ce2de46739908054639e5629c8 /kernel
parent80491eb90c750fcd7d13830062f27ae9b7cc5f75 (diff)
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Fix unlikely (but possible) race condition on task->user access
There's a possible race condition when doing a "switch_uid()" from one user to another, which could race with another thread doing a signal allocation and looking at the old thread ->user pointer as it is freed. This explains an oops reported by Lukasz Trabinski: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/462241 We fix this by delaying the (reference-counted) freeing of the user structure until the thread signal handler lock has been released, so that we know that the signal allocation has either seen the new value or has properly incremented the reference count of the old one. Race identified by Oleg Nesterov. Cc: Lukasz Trabinski <lukasz@wsisiz.edu.pl> Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'kernel')
-rw-r--r--kernel/user.c11
1 files changed, 11 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/kernel/user.c b/kernel/user.c
index 6408c0424291..220e586127a0 100644
--- a/kernel/user.c
+++ b/kernel/user.c
@@ -187,6 +187,17 @@ void switch_uid(struct user_struct *new_user)
atomic_dec(&old_user->processes);
switch_uid_keyring(new_user);
current->user = new_user;
+
+ /*
+ * We need to synchronize with __sigqueue_alloc()
+ * doing a get_uid(p->user).. If that saw the old
+ * user value, we need to wait until it has exited
+ * its critical region before we can free the old
+ * structure.
+ */
+ smp_mb();
+ spin_unlock_wait(&current->sighand->siglock);
+
free_uid(old_user);
suid_keys(current);
}