DescriptionEugene Teo (Security Response)
2009-11-25 03:28:36 UTC
Lennert Buytenhek noticed that delBA handling in mac80211 was broken and has remotely triggerable problems, some of which are due to some code shuffling I did that ended up changing the order in which things were done -- this was
commit d75636ef9c1af224f1097941879d5a8db7cd04e5
Author: Johannes Berg <johannes>
Date: Tue Feb 10 21:25:53 2009 +0100
mac80211: RX aggregation: clean up stop session
and other parts were already present in the original
commit d92684e66091c0f0101819619b315b4bb8b5bcc5
Author: Ron Rindjunsky <ron.rindjunsky>
Date: Mon Jan 28 14:07:22 2008 +0200
mac80211: A-MPDU Tx add delBA from recipient support
The first problem is that I moved a BUG_ON before various checks -- thereby making it possible to hit. As the comment indicates, the BUG_ON can be removed since the ampdu_action callback must already exist when the state is != IDLE.
The second problem isn't easily exploitable but there's a race condition due to unconditionally setting the state to OPERATIONAL when a delBA frame is received, even when no aggregation session was ever initiated. All the drivers
accept stopping the session even then, but that opens a race window where crashes could happen before the driver accepts it. Right now, a WARN_ON may happen with non-HT drivers, while the race opens only for HT drivers.
For this case, there are two things necessary to fix it:
1) don't process spurious delBA frames, and be more careful about the session state; don't drop the lock
2) HT drivers need to be prepared to handle a session stop even before the session was really started -- this is true for all drivers (that support aggregation) but iwlwifi which can be fixed easily. The other HT drivers (ath9k and ar9170) are behaving properly already.
Comment 4Eugene Teo (Security Response)
2009-12-01 04:08:08 UTC
Lennert Buytenhek noticed that delBA handling in mac80211 was broken and has remotely triggerable problems, some of which are due to some code shuffling I did that ended up changing the order in which things were done -- this was commit d75636ef9c1af224f1097941879d5a8db7cd04e5 Author: Johannes Berg <johannes> Date: Tue Feb 10 21:25:53 2009 +0100 mac80211: RX aggregation: clean up stop session and other parts were already present in the original commit d92684e66091c0f0101819619b315b4bb8b5bcc5 Author: Ron Rindjunsky <ron.rindjunsky> Date: Mon Jan 28 14:07:22 2008 +0200 mac80211: A-MPDU Tx add delBA from recipient support The first problem is that I moved a BUG_ON before various checks -- thereby making it possible to hit. As the comment indicates, the BUG_ON can be removed since the ampdu_action callback must already exist when the state is != IDLE. The second problem isn't easily exploitable but there's a race condition due to unconditionally setting the state to OPERATIONAL when a delBA frame is received, even when no aggregation session was ever initiated. All the drivers accept stopping the session even then, but that opens a race window where crashes could happen before the driver accepts it. Right now, a WARN_ON may happen with non-HT drivers, while the race opens only for HT drivers. For this case, there are two things necessary to fix it: 1) don't process spurious delBA frames, and be more careful about the session state; don't drop the lock 2) HT drivers need to be prepared to handle a session stop even before the session was really started -- this is true for all drivers (that support aggregation) but iwlwifi which can be fixed easily. The other HT drivers (ath9k and ar9170) are behaving properly already.