UBIFS: fix a horrid bug

Al Viro pointed me to the fact that '->readdir()' and '->llseek()' have no
mutual exclusion, which means the 'ubifs_dir_llseek()' can be run while we are
in the middle of 'ubifs_readdir()'.

This means that 'file->private_data' can be freed while 'ubifs_readdir()' uses
it, and this is a very bad bug: not only 'ubifs_readdir()' can return garbage,
but this may corrupt memory and lead to all kinds of problems like crashes an
security holes.

This patch fixes the problem by using the 'file->f_version' field, which
'->llseek()' always unconditionally sets to zero. We set it to 1 in
'ubifs_readdir()' and whenever we detect that it became 0, we know there was a
seek and it is time to clear the state saved in 'file->private_data'.

I tested this patch by writing a user-space program which runds readdir and
seek in parallell. I could easily crash the kernel without these patches, but
could not crash it with these patches.

Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Reported-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Tested-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
1 file changed