Re: [PATCH] security/keyring: avoid pagefaults in keyring_read_iterator

From: David Howells
Date: Mon Oct 21 2019 - 10:22:11 EST


Chris von Recklinghausen <crecklin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The put_user call from keyring_read_iterator caused a page fault which
> attempts to lock mm->mmap_sem and type->lock_class (key->sem) in the reverse
> order that keyring_read_iterator did, thus causing the circular locking
> dependency.
>
> Remedy this by using access_ok and __put_user instead of put_user so we'll
> return an error instead of faulting in the page.

I wonder if it's better to create a kernel buffer outside of the lock in
keyctl_read_key(). Hmmm... The reason I didn't want to do that is that
keyrings have don't have limits on the size. Maybe that's not actually a
problem, since 1MiB would be able to hold a list of a quarter of a million
keys.

David