High · published July 25, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
hwrng: virtio: clamp device-reported used.len at copy_data()
random_recv_done() stores the device-reported used.len directly into
vi->data_avail. copy_data() then indexes vi->data[] using
vi->data_idx (advanced by previous copy_data() calls) and issues a
memcpy() without re-validating either value against the posted
buffer size sizeof(vi->data) (SMP_CACHE_BYTES bytes, typically 32
or 64).
A malicious or buggy virtio-rng backend can set used.len beyond
sizeof(vi->data), steering the memcpy() past the end of the inline
array into adjacent kmalloc-1k slab bytes. hwrng_fillfn() mixes
those bytes into the guest RNG, and guest root can also observe
them directly via /dev/hwrng.
Concrete impact is inside the guest:
- Memory-safety / hardening: any virtio-rng backend that
over-reports used.len causes the driver to read past vi->data
into unrelated slab contents. hwrng_fillfn() is a kernel thread
that runs as soon as the device is probed; no guest userspace
interaction is required to first-trigger the OOB.
- Cross-boundary leak (confidential-compute threat model): a
malicious hypervisor cooperating with a malicious or compromised
guest root userspace can use /dev/hwrng as a leak channel for
guest-kernel heap data. The host sets a large used.len, guest
root reads /dev/hwrng, and the returned bytes contain guest
kernel slab contents that were adjacent to vi->data. In
practice, confidential-compute guests (SEV-SNP, TDX) usually
disable virtio-rng entirely, so this path is narrow, but the
fix is still worth carrying because the underlying
memory-safety bug contaminates the guest RNG on any host.
KASAN confirms the OOB on a 7.1-rc4 guest whose virtio-rng backend
has been patched to report used.len = 0x10000:
BUG: KASAN: slab-out-of-bounds in virtio_read+0x394/0x5d0
Read of size 64 at addr ffff88800ae0ba20 by task hwrng/52
Call Trace:
__asan_memcpy+0x23/0x60
virtio_read+0x394/0x5d0
hwrng_fillfn+0xb2/0x470
kthread+0x2cc/0x3a0
Allocated by task 1:
probe_common+0xa5/0x660
virtio_dev_probe+0x549/0xbc0
The buggy address belongs to the object at ffff88800ae0b800
which belongs to the cache kmalloc-1k of size 1024
The buggy address is located 0 bytes to the right of
allocated 544-byte region [ffff88800ae0b800, ffff88800ae0ba20)
Same class of bug as commit c04db81cd028 ("net/9p: Fix buffer
overflow in USB transport layer"), which hardened
usb9pfs_rx_complete() against unchecked device-reported length in
the USB 9p transport.
With the clamp at point of use and array_index_nospec() in place,
the same harness boots cleanly: copy_data() returns zero for the
bogus report, the device-supplied bytes after data_idx are
discarded, and the driver issues a fresh request.