The NFSv3 server in the 2.4.10 kernel has a bug in the symlink
implementation. The target pathname of the symlink is not necessarily
zero terminated when passed to vfs_symlink. This does not happen with
NFSv2, because it explicitly zero terminates the string when decoding it
from XDR (xdr_decode_string does this), but NFSv3 uses
xdr_decode_string_inplace. As a result you may get a spurious
ENAMETOOLONG when trying to create a symbolic link on a NFSv3 mounted
filesystem (if the length of the target path is a multiple of four). If
you don't get an error the created symlink will have random characters
appended, which exposes kernel memory to user space (that's why it's a
security problem).
This patch changes the NFSv3 xdr function to use xdr_decode_string for the
symlink target, which seems to be the easiest solution. I also considered
adding an additional parameter to vfs_symlink to pass the length, but that
requires changes in each and every filesystem and changes the VFS API.
That could be a task for 2.5.x.
--- linux/fs/nfsd/nfs3xdr.c.~1~ Fri Sep 21 06:02:01 2001
+++ linux/fs/nfsd/nfs3xdr.c Tue Oct 2 16:12:27 2001
@@ -99,7 +99,11 @@
char *name;
int i;
- if ((p = xdr_decode_string_inplace(p, namp, lenp, NFS3_MAXPATHLEN)) != NULL) {
+ /*
+ * Cannot use xdr_decode_string_inplace here, the name must be
+ * zero terminated for vfs_symlink.
+ */
+ if ((p = xdr_decode_string(p, namp, lenp, NFS3_MAXPATHLEN)) != NULL) {
for (i = 0, name = *namp; i < *lenp; i++, name++) {
if (*name == '\0')
return NULL;
Andreas.
-- Andreas Schwab "And now for something Andreas.Schwab@suse.de completely different." SuSE Labs, SuSE GmbH, Schanzäckerstr. 10, D-90443 Nürnberg Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756 01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Oct 07 2001 - 21:00:22 EST