Re: [PATCH 3/3] Input: ims-pcu - Check record size in ims_pcu_flash_firmware()

From: Dan Carpenter
Date: Mon Jun 02 2025 - 07:01:42 EST


On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 04:26:18PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 11:22:24PM +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> > The "len" variable comes from the firmware and we generally do
> > trust firmware, but it's always better to double check. If the "len"
> > is too large it could result in memory corruption when we do
> > "memcpy(fragment->data, rec->data, len);"
> >
> > Fixes: 628329d52474 ("Input: add IMS Passenger Control Unit driver")
> > Signed-off-by: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > ---
> > Kees, this is a __counted_by() thing. Would the checkers catch this?
> > We know the maximum valid length for "fragment" is and so it's maybe
> > possible to know that "fragment->len = len;" is too long?
>
> I see:
>
> pcu->cmd_buf as:
>
> u8 cmd_buf[IMS_PCU_BUF_SIZE];
>
> and fragment is:
>
> struct ims_pcu_flash_fmt {
> __le32 addr;
> u8 len;
> u8 data[] __counted_by(len);
> };
>
> I assume you're asking about this line:
>
> fragment->len = len;
>
> I'm not aware of any compiler instrumentation that would bounds check
> this -- it was designed to trust these sort of explicit assignments.
>
> This is hardly the only place in the kernel doing this kind of
> deserialization into a flexible array structure, so maybe there should
> be some kind of helper to do the bounds checking and set the
> "counted_by" counter?
>
> #define gimme(from, into, counter, len) \
> ({ \
> int __gimme_rc = -EINVAL \
> size_t __gimme_size = __member_size(from); \
> if (__gimme_size >= sizeof(*into) && \
> __gimme_size - sizeof(*into) >= len) { \
> into = (void *)from; \
> into->counter = len; \
> __gimme_rc = 0; \
> } \
> __gimme_rc; \
> })
>
> rc = gimme(&pcu->cmd_buf[1], fragment, len, len);
> if (rc) {
> dev_err(pcu->dev,
> "Invalid record length in firmware: %d\n", len);
> return rc;
> }

I don't think that really scales... I don't know how KASAN works
internally. I was thinking it might track the buffer size when we
assign "fragment = (void *)&pcu->cmd_buf[1];" so it could calculate
the valid values of ->len. But that's actually quite complicated.

Smatch does track this:

drivers/input/misc/ims-pcu.c:856 ims_pcu_flash_firmware() buf size: 'fragment->data' 119 elements, 119 bytes

But:

1) Smatch doesn't know about __counted_by(). This is just a matter of
writing the code in Sparse.
2) It's not treating fw->data[] as user controlled data because this
driver loads the firmware asynchronously and Smatch gets confused by
threads.

regards,
dan carpenter