Re: [PATCH] media: usb: ttusb-dec: avoid buffer overflow in ttusb_dec_handle_irq() when DMA failures/attacks occur

[Jia-Ju Bai <baijiaju1990@gmail.com>]

On 2020/5/7 1:43, Greg KH wrote:
> On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 12:48:47AM +0800, Jia-Ju Bai wrote:
>> Yes, I agree that this issue is not new, because DMA attacks are old
>> problems.
>> But I am a little surprised that many current drivers are still vulnerable
>> to DMA attacks.
> Given that the attack vector is very hard to actually do, that's not
> a suprise.
>
> It's only a very recent thing that Linux drivers have started to work on
> "we don't trust the data coming from the hardware" path.  Previously we
> always trusted that, but did not trust data coming from userspace.  So
> work on fixing up drivers in this area is always encouraged.
>
> An example of this would be all of the fuzzing that USB drivers have
> been getting with custom loop-back interfaces and the like over the past
> year or so.  Expanding that to "we don't trust PCI device data" should
> be the next step on this, and would help out your area as well.

Okay, I am glad to hear that :)
Hardware security for the Linux kernel should receive more attention.
Last year some researchers finished an interesting work about fuzzing 
the inputs from hardware:
https://github.com/securesystemslab/periscope


>
>>> If you trust a device enough to plug it in, well, you need to trust it
>>> :)
>> Well, maybe I need to trust all devices in my computer :)
>>
>> Anyway, thanks a lot for your patient explanation and reply.
>> If you have encountered other kinds of DMA-related bugs/vulnerabilities,
>> maybe I can help to detect them using my static-analysis tool :)
> Did you only find a problem in this one driver?  Have you run it on any
> more "complex" drivers and gotten any good results showing either that
> we are programming defensively in this area, or not?
>

At present, I only detect the cases that a DMA value *directly* taints 
array index, loop condition and important kernel-interface calls (such 
as request_irq()).
In this one driver, I only find two problems that mentioned in this patch.
With the kernel configuration "allyesconfig" in my x86_64 machine, I 
find nearly 200 such problems (intra-procedurally and 
inter-procedurally) in all the compiled device drivers.

I also find that several drivers check the data from DMA memory, but 
some of these checks can be bypassed.
Here is an example in drivers/scsi/esas2r/esas2r_vda.c:

The function esas2r_read_vda() uses a DMA value "vi":
   struct atto_ioctl_vda *vi =
             (struct atto_ioctl_vda *)a->vda_buffer;

Then esas2r_read_vda() calls esas2r_process_vda_ioctl() with vi:
   esas2r_process_vda_ioctl(a, vi, rq, &sgc);

In esas2r_process_vda_ioctl(), the DMA value "vi->function" is
used at many places, such as:
   if (vi->function >= vercnt)
   ...
   if (vi->version > esas2r_vdaioctl_versions[vi->function])
   ...

However, when DMA failures or attacks occur, the value of vi->function 
can be changed at any time. In this case, vi->function can be first 
smaller than vercnt, and then it can be larger than vercnt when it is 
used as the array index of esas2r_vdaioctl_versions, causing a 
buffer-overflow vulnerability.

I also submitted this patch, but no one has replied yet:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200504172412.25985-1-baijiaju1990@gmail.com/


Best wishes,
Jia-Ju Bai