CVE-2023-53713

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

arm64: sme: Use STR P to clear FFR context field in streaming SVE mode

The FFR is a predicate register which can vary between 16 and 256 bits in size depending upon the configured vector length. When saving the SVE state in streaming SVE mode, the FFR register is inaccessible and so commit 9f5848665788 ("arm64/sve: Make access to FFR optional") simply clears the FFR field of the in-memory context structure. Unfortunately, it achieves this using an unconditional 8-byte store and so if the SME vector length is anything other than 64 bytes in size we will either fail to clear the entire field or, worse, we will corrupt memory immediately following the structure. This has led to intermittent kfence splats in CI [1] and can trigger kmalloc Redzone corruption messages when running the 'fp-stress' kselftest:

| =============================================================================

BUG kmalloc-1k (Not tainted): kmalloc Redzone overwritten
0xffff000809bf1e22-0xffff000809bf1e27 @offset=7714. First byte 0x0 instead of 0xcc
Allocated in do_sme_acc+0x9c/0x220 age=2613 cpu=1 pid=531
__kmalloc+0x8c/0xcc
do_sme_acc+0x9c/0x220

Replace the 8-byte store with a store of a predicate register which has been zero-initialised with PFALSE, ensuring that the entire field is cleared in memory.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/CA+G9fYtU7HsV0R0dp4XEH5xXHSJFw8KyDf5VQrLLfMxWfxQkag@mail.gmail.com

Affected Software

VendorProductVersion RangeStatus
LinuxLinux9f5848665788a0f07bc175cb2cdd06d367b7556e < 97669214944e80d3756657c21c4f286f3da6a423affected
LinuxLinux9f5848665788a0f07bc175cb2cdd06d367b7556e < 8769a62faacbbb6cac5e35d9047ce445183d4e9faffected
LinuxLinux9f5848665788a0f07bc175cb2cdd06d367b7556e < 1403a899153a12d93fd510e463fd6d0eafba4336affected
LinuxLinux9f5848665788a0f07bc175cb2cdd06d367b7556e < 893b24181b4c4bf1fa2841b1ed192e5413a97cb1affected
LinuxLinux5.16affected
LinuxLinux0 < 5.16unaffected
LinuxLinux6.1.39 <= 6.1.*unaffected
LinuxLinux6.3.13 <= 6.3.*unaffected
LinuxLinux6.4.4 <= 6.4.*unaffected
LinuxLinux6.5 <= *unaffected

Weaknesses

References