published December 16, 2025
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
comedi: check device's attached status in compat ioctls
Syzbot identified an issue [1] that crashes kernel, seemingly due to
unexistent callback dev->get_valid_routes(). By all means, this should
not occur as said callback must always be set to
get_zero_valid_routes() in __comedi_device_postconfig().
As the crash seems to appear exclusively in i386 kernels, at least,
judging from [1] reports, the blame lies with compat versions
of standard IOCTL handlers. Several of them are modified and
do not use comedi_unlocked_ioctl(). While functionality of these
ioctls essentially copy their original versions, they do not
have required sanity check for device's attached status. This,
in turn, leads to a possibility of calling select IOCTLs on a
device that has not been properly setup, even via COMEDI_DEVCONFIG.
Doing so on unconfigured devices means that several crucial steps
are missed, for instance, specifying dev->get_valid_routes()
callback.
Fix this somewhat crudely by ensuring device's attached status before
performing any ioctls, improving logic consistency between modern
and compat functions.
[1] Syzbot report:
BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000000
...
CR2: ffffffffffffffd6 CR3: 000000006c717000 CR4: 0000000000352ef0
Call Trace:
<TASK>
get_valid_routes drivers/comedi/comedi_fops.c:1322 [inline]
parse_insn+0x78c/0x1970 drivers/comedi/comedi_fops.c:1401
do_insnlist_ioctl+0x272/0x700 drivers/comedi/comedi_fops.c:1594
compat_insnlist drivers/comedi/comedi_fops.c:3208 [inline]
comedi_compat_ioctl+0x810/0x990 drivers/comedi/comedi_fops.c:3273
__do_compat_sys_ioctl fs/ioctl.c:695 [inline]
__se_compat_sys_ioctl fs/ioctl.c:638 [inline]
__ia32_compat_sys_ioctl+0x242/0x370 fs/ioctl.c:638
do_syscall_32_irqs_on arch/x86/entry/syscall_32.c:83 [inline]
...