CVE-2024-46828

CVE-2024-46828

High · published September 27, 2024

CVSS v3.1
7.1
EPSS
0%
Percentile
15.4
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

sched: sch_cake: fix bulk flow accounting logic for host fairness

In sch_cake, we keep track of the count of active bulk flows per host,

when running in dst/src host fairness mode, which is used as the

round-robin weight when iterating through flows. The count of active

bulk flows is updated whenever a flow changes state.

This has a peculiar interaction with the hash collision handling: when a

hash collision occurs (after the set-associative hashing), the state of

the hash bucket is simply updated to match the new packet that collided,

and if host fairness is enabled, that also means assigning new per-host

state to the flow. For this reason, the bulk flow counters of the

host(s) assigned to the flow are decremented, before new state is

assigned (and the counters, which may not belong to the same host

anymore, are incremented again).

Back when this code was introduced, the host fairness mode was always

enabled, so the decrement was unconditional. When the configuration

flags were introduced the *increment* was made conditional, but

the *decrement* was not. Which of course can lead to a spurious

decrement (and associated wrap-around to U16_MAX).

AFAICT, when host fairness is disabled, the decrement and wrap-around

happens as soon as a hash collision occurs (which is not that common in

itself, due to the set-associative hashing). However, in most cases this

is harmless, as the value is only used when host fairness mode is

enabled. So in order to trigger an array overflow, sch_cake has to first

be configured with host fairness disabled, and while running in this

mode, a hash collision has to occur to cause the overflow. Then, the

qdisc has to be reconfigured to enable host fairness, which leads to the

array out-of-bounds because the wrapped-around value is retained and

used as an array index. It seems that syzbot managed to trigger this,

which is quite impressive in its own right.

This patch fixes the issue by introducing the same conditional check on

decrement as is used on increment.

The original bug predates the upstreaming of cake, but the commit listed

in the Fixes tag touched that code, meaning that this patch won't apply

before that.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
7.1 · HIGH
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00250 · 15.4th percentile
Published
2024-09-27T17:15Z
Affected products (12)
ProductVersionsFixed in
linux/linux_kernel≥ 5.1, < 5.4.2845.4.284
linux/linux_kernel≥ 5.10, < 5.10.2265.10.226
linux/linux_kernel≥ 5.15, < 5.15.1675.15.167
linux/linux_kernel≥ 6.1, < 6.1.1106.1.110
linux/linux_kernel≥ 6.6, < 6.6.516.6.51
linux/linux_kernel≥ 6.10, < 6.10.106.10.10
linux/linux_kernelall versions—
linux/linux_kernelall versions—
linux/linux_kernelall versions—
linux/linux_kernelall versions—
linux/linux_kernelall versions—
linux/linux_kernelall versions—
References (9)
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 27 SEP 12:39Z
    sched: sch_cake: fix bulk flow accounting logic for host fairness
    cvelistv5