CVE-2024-45024 mm/hugetlb: fix hugetlb vs. core-mm PT locking

High 7.8 Published Updated

A race condition in Linux kernel hugetlb page table locking can cause system warnings and potential denial of service.

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-2024-45024?

CVE-2024-45024 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 11 Sep 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:

mm/hugetlb: fix hugetlb vs. core-mm PT locking

We recently made GUP's common page table walking code to also walk hugetlb VMAs without most hugetlb special-casing, preparing for the future of having less hugetlb-specific page table walking code in the codebase. Turns out that we missed one page table locking detail: page table locking for hugetlb folios that are not mapped using a single PMD/PUD.

Assume we have hugetlb folio that spans multiple PTEs (e.g., 64 KiB hugetlb folios on arm64 with 4 KiB base page size). GUP, as it walks the page tables, will perform a pte_offset_map_lock() to grab the PTE table lock.

However, hugetlb that concurrently modifies these page tables would actually grab the mm->page_table_lock: with USE_SPLIT_PTE_PTLOCKS, the locks would differ. Something similar can happen right now with hugetlb folios that span multiple PMDs when USE_SPLIT_PMD_PTLOCKS.

This issue can be reproduced [1], for example triggering:

[ 3105.936100] ------------[ cut here ]------------ [ 3105.939323] WARNING: CPU: 31 PID: 2732 at mm/gup.c:142 try_grab_folio+0x11c/0x188 [ 3105.944634] Modules linked in: [...] [ 3105.974841] CPU: 31 PID: 2732 Comm: reproducer Not tainted 6.10.0-64.eln141.aarch64 #1 [ 3105.980406] Hardware name: QEMU KVM Virtual Machine, BIOS edk2-20240524-4.fc40 05/24/2024 [ 3105.986185] pstate: 60000005 (nZCv daif -PAN -UAO -TCO -DIT -SSBS BTYPE=--) [ 3105.991108] pc : try_grab_folio+0x11c/0x188 [ 3105.994013] lr : follow_page_pte+0xd8/0x430 [ 3105.996986] sp : ffff80008eafb8f0 [ 3105.999346] x29: ffff80008eafb900 x28: ffffffe8d481f380 x27: 00f80001207cff43 [ 3106.004414] x26: 0000000000000001 x25: 0000000000000000 x24: ffff80008eafba48 [ 3106.009520] x23: 0000ffff9372f000 x22: ffff7a54459e2000 x21: ffff7a546c1aa978 [ 3106.014529] x20: ffffffe8d481f3c0 x19: 0000000000610041 x18: 0000000000000001 [ 3106.019506] x17: 0000000000000001 x16: ffffffffffffffff x15: 0000000000000000 [ 3106.024494] x14: ffffb85477fdfe08 x13: 0000ffff9372ffff x12: 0000000000000000 [ 3106.029469] x11: 1fffef4a88a96be1 x10: ffff7a54454b5f0c x9 : ffffb854771b12f0 [ 3106.034324] x8 : 0008000000000000 x7 : ffff7a546c1aa980 x6 : 0008000000000080 [ 3106.038902] x5 : 00000000001207cf x4 : 0000ffff9372f000 x3 : ffffffe8d481f000 [ 3106.043420] x2 : 0000000000610041 x1 : 0000000000000001 x0 : 0000000000000000 [ 3106.047957] Call trace: [ 3106.049522] try_grab_folio+0x11c/0x188 [ 3106.051996] follow_pmd_mask.constprop.0.isra.0+0x150/0x2e0 [ 3106.055527] follow_page_mask+0x1a0/0x2b8 [ 3106.058118] __get_user_pages+0xf0/0x348 [ 3106.060647] faultin_page_range+0xb0/0x360 [ 3106.063651] do_madvise+0x340/0x598

Let's make huge_pte_lockptr() effectively use the same PT locks as any core-mm page table walker would. Add ptep_lockptr() to obtain the PTE page table lock using a pte pointer -- unfortunately we cannot convert pte_lockptr() because virt_to_page() doesn't work with kmap'ed page tables we can have with CONFIG_HIGHPTE.

Handle CONFIG_PGTABLE_LEVELS correctly by checking in reverse order, such that when e.g., CONFIG_PGTABLE_LEVELS==2 with PGDIR_SIZE==P4D_SIZE==PUD_SIZE==PMD_SIZE will work as expected. Document why that works.

There is one ugly case: powerpc 8xx, whereby we have an 8 MiB hugetlb folio being mapped using two PTE page tables. While hugetlb wants to take the PMD table lock, core-mm would grab the PTE table lock of one of both PTE page tables. In such corner cases, we have to make sure that both locks match, which is (fortunately!) currently guaranteed for 8xx as it does not support SMP and consequently doesn't use split PT locks.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/[email protected]/

Weakness: CWE-667

Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-45024?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2024-45024?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Is CVE-2024-45024 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-45024 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as BELL-CVE-2024-45024, DEBIAN-CVE-2024-45024, GHSA-8grv-f28f-g844, UBUNTU-CVE-2024-45024.

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