Description of problem: Reported by Marcus Meissner. While programming a USB device using libusb he found that a usb read from the device returned data it should not. Looking into the code showed that in USB commands that fail during device communication (with e.g. USB timeouts) return the transfer buffer unmodified back to userspace. This transfer buffer is allocated with kmalloc before and not initialized, so userspace gets to see recently freed data of the kernel. Greg, Linus and Alan produced a fix that was commited to mainline: commit d4a4683ca054ed9917dfc9e3ff0f7ecf74ad90d6 The issue seems to have been in the kernel for the whole 2.6 series (oldest kernel he looked at was 2.6.5, he tested down to 2.6.25). Access to USB userspace devices either requires root access or desktop user access via udev/hal ACLs on non-mass-storage Digital Cameras or Media Players. (So the desktop user needs to plugin such a ACL getting device before being able to read the memory).
2.6.32-stable review patch. ------------------ From: Greg KH <greg> commit d4a4683ca054ed9917dfc9e3ff0f7ecf74ad90d6 upstream. We need to only copy the data received by the device to userspace, not the whole kernel buffer, which can contain "stale" data. Thanks to Marcus Meissner for pointing this out and testing the fix. Reported-by: Marcus Meissner <meissner> Tested-by: Marcus Meissner <meissner> Cc: Alan Stern <stern.edu> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh> --- drivers/usb/core/devio.c | 8 ++++---- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) --- a/drivers/usb/core/devio.c +++ b/drivers/usb/core/devio.c @@ -1312,9 +1312,9 @@ static int processcompl(struct async *as void __user *addr = as->userurb; unsigned int i; - if (as->userbuffer) + if (as->userbuffer && urb->actual_length) if (copy_to_user(as->userbuffer, urb->transfer_buffer, - urb->transfer_buffer_length)) + urb->actual_length)) goto err_out; if (put_user(as->status, &userurb->status)) goto err_out; @@ -1435,9 +1435,9 @@ static int processcompl_compat(struct as void __user *addr = as->userurb; unsigned int i; - if (as->userbuffer) + if (as->userbuffer && urb->actual_length) if (copy_to_user(as->userbuffer, urb->transfer_buffer, - urb->transfer_buffer_length)) + urb->actual_length)) return -EFAULT; if (put_user(as->status, &userurb->status)) return -EFAULT;
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Via RHSA-2010:0394 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2010-0394.html
Acknowledgements: Red Hat would like to thank Marcus Meissner for reporting this issue.
This issue has been addressed in following products: MRG for RHEL-5 Via RHSA-2010:0631 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2010-0631.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Via RHSA-2010:0723 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2010-0723.html