CVE-2024-26798 fbcon: always restore the old font data in fbcon_do_set_font()
A local attacker can trigger a kernel crash by exploiting a null pointer dereference in the fbcon font handling code during a failed resize operation.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2024-26798?
CVE-2024-26798 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 4 Apr 2024. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
fbcon: always restore the old font data in fbcon_do_set_font()
Commit a5a923038d70 (fbdev: fbcon: Properly revert changes when vc_resize() failed) started restoring old font data upon failure (of vc_resize()). But it performs so only for user fonts. It means that the "system"/internal fonts are not restored at all. So in result, the very first call to fbcon_do_set_font() performs no restore at all upon failing vc_resize().
This can be reproduced by Syzkaller to crash the system on the next invocation of font_get(). It's rather hard to hit the allocation failure in vc_resize() on the first font_set(), but not impossible. Esp. if fault injection is used to aid the execution/failure. It was demonstrated by Sirius: BUG: unable to handle page fault for address: fffffffffffffff8 #PF: supervisor read access in kernel mode #PF: error_code(0x0000) - not-present page PGD cb7b067 P4D cb7b067 PUD cb7d067 PMD 0 Oops: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP KASAN CPU: 1 PID: 8007 Comm: poc Not tainted 6.7.0-g9d1694dc91ce #20 Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996), BIOS 1.15.0-1 04/01/2014 RIP: 0010:fbcon_get_font+0x229/0x800 drivers/video/fbdev/core/fbcon.c:2286 Call Trace: <TASK> con_font_get drivers/tty/vt/vt.c:4558 [inline] con_font_op+0x1fc/0xf20 drivers/tty/vt/vt.c:4673 vt_k_ioctl drivers/tty/vt/vt_ioctl.c:474 [inline] vt_ioctl+0x632/0x2ec0 drivers/tty/vt/vt_ioctl.c:752 tty_ioctl+0x6f8/0x1570 drivers/tty/tty_io.c:2803 vfs_ioctl fs/ioctl.c:51 [inline] ...
So restore the font data in any case, not only for user fonts. Note the later 'if' is now protected by 'old_userfont' and not 'old_data' as the latter is always set now. (And it is supposed to be non-NULL. Otherwise we would see the bug above again.)
Weakness: CWE-770
Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-26798?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2024-26798?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2024-26798 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-26798 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2024-26798, DEBIAN-CVE-2024-26798, GHSA-wm99-2g28-jp5m, UBUNTU-CVE-2024-26798.