CVE-2021-47225

mac80211: fix deadlock in AP/VLAN handling

Medium · published May 21, 2024

CVSS v3.1
5.5
EPSS
0%
Percentile
3.6
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mac80211: fix deadlock in AP/VLAN handling

Syzbot reports that when you have AP_VLAN interfaces that are up

and close the AP interface they belong to, we get a deadlock. No

surprise - since we dev_close() them with the wiphy mutex held,

which goes back into the netdev notifier in cfg80211 and tries to

acquire the wiphy mutex there.

To fix this, we need to do two things:

1) prevent changing iftype while AP_VLANs are up, we can't

easily fix this case since cfg80211 already calls us with

the wiphy mutex held, but change_interface() is relatively

rare in drivers anyway, so changing iftype isn't used much

(and userspace has to fall back to down/change/up anyway)

2) pull the dev_close() loop over VLANs out of the wiphy mutex

section in the normal stop case

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
5.5 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00147 · 3.6th percentile
Published
2024-05-21T14:19Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 21 MAY 14:19Z
    mac80211: fix deadlock in AP/VLAN handling
    cvelistv5