Re: [PATCH] certs: Prevent spurious errors on repeated blacklisting

From: Mickaël Salaün
Date: Mon Nov 07 2022 - 08:12:24 EST


This is a follow-up of https://lore.kernel.org/r/c8c65713-5cda-43ad-8018-20f2e32e4432@xxxxxxxx

Added Jarkko, Mark Pearson, Eric Snowberg and more ML in Cc.


On 04/11/2022 02:47, Thomas Weißschuh wrote:
When the blacklist keyring was changed to allow updates from the root
user it gained an ->update() function that disallows all updates.
When the a hash is blacklisted multiple times from the builtin or
firmware-provided blacklist this spams prominent logs during boot:

[ 0.890814] blacklist: Problem blacklisting hash (-13)

As all these repeated calls to mark_raw_hash_blacklisted() would create
the same keyring entry again anyways these errors can be safely ignored.

These errors can indeed be safely ignored, however they highlight issues with some firmware vendors not checking nor optimizing their blocked hashes. This raises security concerns, and it should be fixed by firmware vendors.


Fixes: 6364d106e041 ("certs: Allow root user to append signed hashes to the blacklist keyring")
Signed-off-by: Thomas Weißschuh <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
certs/blacklist.c | 4 +++-
1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/certs/blacklist.c b/certs/blacklist.c
index 41f10601cc72..5f7f2882ced7 100644
--- a/certs/blacklist.c
+++ b/certs/blacklist.c
@@ -191,7 +191,9 @@ static int mark_raw_hash_blacklisted(const char *hash)
BLACKLIST_KEY_PERM,
KEY_ALLOC_NOT_IN_QUOTA |
KEY_ALLOC_BUILT_IN);
- if (IS_ERR(key)) {
+
+ /* Blacklisting the same hash twice fails but would be idempotent */
+ if (IS_ERR(key) && PTR_ERR(key) != -EACCES) {

We should not hide EACCES errors. This logs issues, which is correct for duplicate hashes, and can help firmware vendors to fix their database. I'd really like to see a different log message instead: change the duplicate entry error code from EACCES to EEXIST, and call pr_warn for this specific case.


pr_err("Problem blacklisting hash (%ld)\n", PTR_ERR(key));
return PTR_ERR(key);
}

base-commit: ee6050c8af96bba2f81e8b0793a1fc2f998fcd20