fork: hold newly created processes

Mateusz Guzik mjguzik at gmail.com
Sun Oct 5 18:46:27 UTC 2014


On Sun, Oct 05, 2014 at 08:14:58PM +0300, Konstantin Belousov wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 05, 2014 at 12:29:12PM +0200, Mateusz Guzik wrote:
> > fork: hold newly created processes
> > 
> > Consumers of fork1 -> do_fork receive new proc pointer, but nothing
> > guarnatees its stability at that time.
> > 
> > New process could already exit and be waited for, in which case we get a
> > use after free.
> Since the new process is the child of the current process, it can happen
> only if the code is self-inflicting.  I can imagine that the only way
> to achieve it, do wait() in other thread.
> 

Yes, the patch in question is an anti local dos measure.

> That said, there is no harm for the kernel state, since struct proc is
> type-stable, so we do not dereference a random memory, do you agree ?
> We could return non-existing or reused pid, but this can occur with
> your patch as well, since the same exit/wait could be done while forking
> thread executes syscall return code.

Pinning the process with PHOLD means *fork will always return the right
pid.

Of course the child could be gone by the time fork returns, but this is
not a problem.

In fork1 you can find:
	do_fork(td, flags, newproc, td2, vm2, pdflags);

	/*
	 * Return child proc pointer to parent.
	 */
	*procp = newproc;
	if (flags & RFPROCDESC) {
		procdesc_finit(newproc->p_procdesc, fp_procdesc);
		fdrop(fp_procdesc, td);
	}
	racct_proc_fork_done(newproc);
	return (0);

Here nothing guarantees newproc is stable and I managed to provoke a crash
with null pointer dereference in procdesc_finit since it got a now
cleared up process.

I think it is possible it will get a different process, provided someone
managed to fork it in the meantime.

Also, although I didn't try to provoke anything, linux emulation layer
does a lot of work with newly returned proc pointer.

-- 
Mateusz Guzik <mjguzik gmail.com>


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