Bug 2405767 (CVE-2023-53728) - CVE-2023-53728 kernel: posix-timers: Ensure timer ID search-loop limit is valid
Summary: CVE-2023-53728 kernel: posix-timers: Ensure timer ID search-loop limit is valid
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2023-53728
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
low
low
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security DevOps Team
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2025-10-22 14:05 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2025-10-22 16:26 UTC (History)
0 users

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-10-22 14:05:41 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

posix-timers: Ensure timer ID search-loop limit is valid

posix_timer_add() tries to allocate a posix timer ID by starting from the
cached ID which was stored by the last successful allocation.

This is done in a loop searching the ID space for a free slot one by
one. The loop has to terminate when the search wrapped around to the
starting point.

But that's racy vs. establishing the starting point. That is read out
lockless, which leads to the following problem:

CPU0	  	      	     	   CPU1
posix_timer_add()
  start = sig->posix_timer_id;
  lock(hash_lock);
  ...				   posix_timer_add()
  if (++sig->posix_timer_id < 0)
      			             start = sig->posix_timer_id;
     sig->posix_timer_id = 0;

So CPU1 can observe a negative start value, i.e. -1, and the loop break
never happens because the condition can never be true:

  if (sig->posix_timer_id == start)
     break;

While this is unlikely to ever turn into an endless loop as the ID space is
huge (INT_MAX), the racy read of the start value caught the attention of
KCSAN and Dmitry unearthed that incorrectness.

Rewrite it so that all id operations are under the hash lock.


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