Bug 2393502 (CVE-2025-39684)

Summary: CVE-2025-39684 kernel: comedi: Fix use of uninitialized memory in do_insn_ioctl() and do_insnlist_ioctl()
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-09-05 18:02:43 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

comedi: Fix use of uninitialized memory in do_insn_ioctl() and do_insnlist_ioctl()

syzbot reports a KMSAN kernel-infoleak in `do_insn_ioctl()`.  A kernel
buffer is allocated to hold `insn->n` samples (each of which is an
`unsigned int`).  For some instruction types, `insn->n` samples are
copied back to user-space, unless an error code is being returned.  The
problem is that not all the instruction handlers that need to return
data to userspace fill in the whole `insn->n` samples, so that there is
an information leak.  There is a similar syzbot report for
`do_insnlist_ioctl()`, although it does not have a reproducer for it at
the time of writing.

One culprit is `insn_rw_emulate_bits()` which is used as the handler for
`INSN_READ` or `INSN_WRITE` instructions for subdevices that do not have
a specific handler for that instruction, but do have an `INSN_BITS`
handler.  For `INSN_READ` it only fills in at most 1 sample, so if
`insn->n` is greater than 1, the remaining `insn->n - 1` samples copied
to userspace will be uninitialized kernel data.

Another culprit is `vm80xx_ai_insn_read()` in the "vm80xx" driver.  It
never returns an error, even if it fails to fill the buffer.

Fix it in `do_insn_ioctl()` and `do_insnlist_ioctl()` by making sure
that uninitialized parts of the allocated buffer are zeroed before
handling each instruction.

Thanks to Arnaud Lecomte for their fix to `do_insn_ioctl()`.  That fix
replaced the call to `kmalloc_array()` with `kcalloc()`, but it is not
always necessary to clear the whole buffer.