Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 1597843
CVE-2018-12931 kernel: stack-based out-of-bounds write in ntfs_attr_find in the ntfs.ko
Last modified: 2018-08-28 18:50:16 EDT
A flaw was found in ntfs_attr_find in the ntfs.ko filesystem driver in the Linux kernel. This allows attackers to trigger a stack-based out-of-bounds write and cause a denial of service or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted ntfs filesystem image. Due to the nature of the flaw, privilege escalation cannot be fully ruled out, although we believe it is unlikely. References: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1763403 https://marc.info/?l=linux-ntfs-dev&m=152413769810234&w=2 https://marc.info/?t=152407734400002&r=1&w=2 (a whole thread)
Created kernel tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: fedora-all [bug 1597845]
Notes: The NTFS filesystem is shipped only with Red Hat MRG-2 product. While the flaw reproducer works when run as a privileged user (the "root"), this requires a mount of a certain filesystem image. An unprivileged attacker cannot do this even from a user+mount namespace: $ unshare -U -r -m # mount -t ntfs fs.img mnt/ mount: mnt/: mount failed: Operation not permitted. The article https://lwn.net/Articles/652468/ (thanks, Jonathan!) discusses unprivileged user mounts and hostile filesystem images: > ... for the most part, the mount() system call is denied to processes running > within user namespaces, even if they are privileged in their namespaces. It also states that unprivileged filesystem mounts are not allowed as of now in the Linux kernel and probably won't be allowed in a future. Until that such flaws are considered as not exploitable: > There were no proposals for solutions to the hostile-filesystem problem. > But, in the absence of some sort of assurance that they can be made safe, > unprivileged filesystem mounts are unlikely to gain acceptance; even if the > feature gets into the kernel, distributions would be likely to disable it. On the other hand, there is a potential possibility that still an attacker can trick a regular user to mount a malicious filesystem image, like trick him to insert an usb-flash-drive with a forged filesystem to a desktop system which will auto-mount it. In case this results only in a system crash (a DoS due to, for example, a NULL pointer dereference) the flaw impact is low but it still exists. In case of a flaw which results in a privilege escalation the flaw's impact is higher. So the Red Hat would still consider bugs which require mounting a filesystem image to exploit as security flaws, though with Low severity.