Re: [PATCH 2/3] block: fail SCSI passthrough ioctls on partitiondevices

From: Paolo Bonzini
Date: Thu Jan 05 2012 - 11:41:41 EST


On 01/05/2012 05:16 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 5:18 AM, Paolo Bonzini<pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hence, changing scsi_verify_blk_ioctl to return ENOIOCTLCMD is not
really possible.

What?

"We have a bug in the block IO layer, so we cannot possible fix
another problem?"

Whjat the f*ck is the logic there?

Just fix the *obvious* breakage in BLKROSET. It's clearly what the
code *intends* to do, it just didn't check for ENOIOCTLCMD.

Aha, so this is clear and obvious. And who knows that something else won't break? Such as the 32-on-64 logic that already uses ENOIOCTLCMD for something else?

If the block maintainers want to fix that, fine. "git blame block/ioctl.c" shows that it's been like this for 6 years and in general the file has hardly seen changes. That's enough to make me steer away from that code.

Foolish me who found a bug, and an exploitable one for that matter, and even tried to fix it. Looks like security by obscurity would have served users better.

Paolo
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