In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/slub: add missing TID updates on slab deactivation
The fastpath in slab_alloc_node() assumes that c->slab is stable as long as the TID stays the same. However, two places in __slab_alloc() currently don't update the TID when deactivating the CPU slab.
If multiple operations race the right way, this could lead to an object
getting lost; or, in an even more unlikely situation, it could even lead to
an object being freed onto the wrong slab's freelist, messing up the
inuse counter and eventually causing a page to be freed to the page
allocator while it still contains slab objects.
(I haven't actually tested these cases though, this is just based on looking at the code. Writing testcases for this stuff seems like it'd be a pain...)
The race leading to state inconsistency is (all operations on the same CPU and kmem_cache):
- task A: begin do_slab_free():
- read TID
- read pcpu freelist (==NULL)
- check
slab == c->slab(true) - [PREEMPT A->B]
- task B: begin slab_alloc_node():
- fastpath fails (
c->freelistis NULL) - enter __slab_alloc()
- slub_get_cpu_ptr() (disables preemption)
- enter ___slab_alloc()
- take local_lock_irqsave()
- read c->freelist as NULL
- get_freelist() returns NULL
- write
c->slab = NULL - drop local_unlock_irqrestore()
- goto new_slab
- slub_percpu_partial() is NULL
- get_partial() returns NULL
- slub_put_cpu_ptr() (enables preemption)
- [PREEMPT B->A]
- task A: finish do_slab_free():
- this_cpu_cmpxchg_double() succeeds()
- [CORRUPT STATE: c->slab==NULL, c->freelist!=NULL]
From there, the object on c->freelist will get lost if task B is allowed to continue from here: It will proceed to the retry_load_slab label, set c->slab, then jump to load_freelist, which clobbers c->freelist.
But if we instead continue as follows, we get worse corruption:
- task A: run __slab_free() on object from other struct slab:
- CPU_PARTIAL_FREE case (slab was on no list, is now on pcpu partial)
- task A: run slab_alloc_node() with NUMA node constraint:
- fastpath fails (c->slab is NULL)
- call __slab_alloc()
- slub_get_cpu_ptr() (disables preemption)
- enter ___slab_alloc()
- c->slab is NULL: goto new_slab
- slub_percpu_partial() is non-NULL
- set c->slab to slub_percpu_partial(c)
- [CORRUPT STATE: c->slab points to slab-1, c->freelist has objects
- goto redo
- node_match() fails
- goto deactivate_slab
- existing c->freelist is passed into deactivate_slab()
- inuse count of slab-1 is decremented to account for object from
At this point, the inuse count of slab-1 is 1 lower than it should be. This means that if we free all allocated objects in slab-1 except for one, SLUB will think that slab-1 is completely unused, and may free its page, leading to use-after-free.