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authorPetr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>2019-04-17 13:53:48 +0200
committerPetr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>2019-04-26 16:20:43 +0200
commit3e5903eb9cff707301712498aed9e34b3e2ee883 (patch)
tree1f2e896d9b3a1c9e064ba8defe626b25bd7c0e76 /Documentation/core-api
parentvsprintf: Consolidate handling of unknown pointer specifiers (diff)
downloadlinux-3e5903eb9cff707301712498aed9e34b3e2ee883.tar.xz
linux-3e5903eb9cff707301712498aed9e34b3e2ee883.zip
vsprintf: Prevent crash when dereferencing invalid pointers
We already prevent crash when dereferencing some obviously broken pointers. But the handling is not consistent. Sometimes we print "(null)" only for pure NULL pointer, sometimes for pointers in the first page and sometimes also for pointers in the last page (error codes). Note that printk() call this code under logbuf_lock. Any recursive printks are redirected to the printk_safe implementation and the messages are stored into per-CPU buffers. These buffers might be eventually flushed in printk_safe_flush_on_panic() but it is not guaranteed. This patch adds a check using probe_kernel_read(). It is not a full-proof test. But it should help to see the error message in 99% situations where the kernel would silently crash otherwise. Also it makes the error handling unified for "%s" and the many %p* specifiers that need to read the data from a given address. We print: + (null) when accessing data on pure pure NULL address + (efault) when accessing data on an invalid address It does not affect the %p* specifiers that just print the given address in some form, namely %pF, %pf, %pS, %ps, %pB, %pK, %px, and plain %p. Note that we print (efault) from security reasons. In fact, the real address can be seen only by %px or eventually %pK. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190417115350.20479-9-pmladek@suse.com To: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Cc: "Tobin C . Harding" <me@tobin.cc> Cc: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky.work@gmail.com> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Reviewed-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com> Reviewed-by: Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com> Signed-off-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/core-api')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/core-api/printk-formats.rst7
1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/core-api/printk-formats.rst b/Documentation/core-api/printk-formats.rst
index c37ec7cd9c06..b2cac8d76b66 100644
--- a/Documentation/core-api/printk-formats.rst
+++ b/Documentation/core-api/printk-formats.rst
@@ -58,6 +58,13 @@ A raw pointer value may be printed with %p which will hash the address
before printing. The kernel also supports extended specifiers for printing
pointers of different types.
+Some of the extended specifiers print the data on the given address instead
+of printing the address itself. In this case, the following error messages
+might be printed instead of the unreachable information::
+
+ (null) data on plain NULL address
+ (efault) data on invalid address
+
Plain Pointers
--------------