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UK Cyber Defence
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CVE-2022-49272

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ALSA: pcm: Fix potential AB/BA lock with buffer_mutex and mmap_lock syzbot caught a potential deadlock between the PCM runtime->buffer_mutex and the mm->mmap_lock.

MEDIUM 5.5EPSS 0.20%

Does this matter?

Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.20%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ALSA: pcm: Fix potential AB/BA lock with buffer_mutex and mmap_lock syzbot caught a potential deadlock between the PCM runtime->buffer_mutex and the mm->mmap_lock. It was brought by the recent fix to cover the racy read/write and other ioctls, and in that commit, I overlooked a (hopefully only) corner case that may take the revert lock, namely, the OSS mmap. The OSS mmap operation exceptionally allows to re-configure the parameters inside the OSS mmap syscall, where mm->mmap_mutex is already held. Meanwhile, the copy_from/to_user calls at read/write operations also take the mm->mmap_lock internally, hence it may lead to a AB/BA deadlock. A similar problem was already seen in the past and we fixed it with a refcount (in commit b248371628aa). The former fix covered only the call paths with OSS read/write and OSS ioctls, while we need to cover the concurrent access via both ALSA and OSS APIs now. This patch addresses the problem above by replacing the buffer_mutex lock in the read/write operations with a refcount similar as we've used for OSS. The new field, runtime->buffer_accessing, keeps the number of concurrent read/write operations. Unlike the former buffer_mutex protection, this protects only around the copy_from/to_user() calls; the other codes are basically protected by the PCM stream lock. The refcount can be a negative, meaning blocked by the ioctls. If a negative value is seen, the read/write aborts with -EBUSY. In the ioctl side, OTOH, they check this refcount, too, and set to a negative value for blocking unless it's already being accessed.

CVSS 3.1
5.5 MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS
0.20% probability · 10th percentile
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-667
Affected
linux/linux kernel
Source
416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.