In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
ALSA: pcm: Fix potential AB/BA lock with buffer_mutex and mmap_lock
syzbot caught a potential deadlock between the PCM
runtime->buffer_mutex and the mm->mmap_lock. It was brought by the
recent fix to cover the racy read/write and other ioctls, and in that
commit, I overlooked a (hopefully only) corner case that may take the
revert lock, namely, the OSS mmap. The OSS mmap operation
exceptionally allows to re-configure the parameters inside the OSS
mmap syscall, where mm->mmap_mutex is already held. Meanwhile, the
copy_from/to_user calls at read/write operations also take the
mm->mmap_lock internally, hence it may lead to a AB/BA deadlock.
A similar problem was already seen in the past and we fixed it with a
refcount (in commit b248371628aa). The former fix covered only the
call paths with OSS read/write and OSS ioctls, while we need to cover
the concurrent access via both ALSA and OSS APIs now.
This patch addresses the problem above by replacing the buffer_mutex
lock in the read/write operations with a refcount similar as we've
used for OSS. The new field, runtime->buffer_accessing, keeps the
number of concurrent read/write operations. Unlike the former
buffer_mutex protection, this protects only around the
copy_from/to_user() calls; the other codes are basically protected by
the PCM stream lock. The refcount can be a negative, meaning blocked
by the ioctls. If a negative value is seen, the read/write aborts
with -EBUSY. In the ioctl side, OTOH, they check this refcount, too,
and set to a negative value for blocking unless it's already being
accessed.
Publication date: Wed, 26 Feb 2025 01:56:00 +0000