CVE-2022-45873 (C, published 2022-11-23T23:15Z)
Description: value: systemd 250 and 251 allows local users to achieve a systemd-coredump deadlock by triggering a crash that has a long backtrace. This occurs in parse_elf_object in shared/elf-util.c. The exploitation methodology is to crash a binary calling the same function recursively, and put it in a deeply nested directory to make its backtrace large enough to cause the deadlock. This must be done 16 times when MaxConnections=16 is set for the systemd/units/systemd-coredump.socket file.
Severity: nan (CVSS v3 base score: 5.5)
Weakness: CWE-400 \u2014 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource, thereby enabling an actor to influence the amount of resources consumed, eventually leading to the exhaustion of available resources.
Repository: https://github.com/systemd/systemd
Files changed:
src/shared/elf-util.c
Commit message: coredump: avoid deadlock when passing processed backtrace data

We would deadlock when passing the data back from the forked-off process that
was doing backtrace generation back to the coredump parent. This is because we
fork the child and wait for it to exit. The child tries to write too much data
to the output pipe, and and after the first 64k blocks on the parent because
the pipe is full. The bug surfaced in Fedora because of a combination of four
factors:
- 87707784c70dc9894ec613df0a6e75e732a362a3 was backported to v251.5, which
  allowed coredump processing to be successful.
- 1a0281a3ebf4f8c16d40aa9e63103f16cd23bb2a was NOT backported, so the output
  was very verbose.
- Fedora has the ELF package metadata available, so a lot of output can be
  generated. Most other distros just don't have the information.
- gnome-calendar crashes and has a bazillion modules and 69596 bytes of output
  are generated for it.

Fixes https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2135778.

The code is changed to try to write data opportunistically. If we get partial
information, that is still logged. In is generally better to log partial
backtrace information than nothing at all.


Vulnerable code:
                r = RET_NERRNO(pipe2(return_pipe, O_CLOEXEC));
                r = RET_NERRNO(pipe2(json_pipe, O_CLOEXEC));
                        r = loop_write(return_pipe[1], buf, strlen(buf), false);
                        if (r < 0)
                        json_variant_dump(package_metadata, JSON_FORMAT_FLUSH, json_out, NULL);
                        return r;

Fixed code:
/* The amount of data we're willing to write to each of the output pipes. */
#define COREDUMP_PIPE_MAX (1024*1024U)

                r = RET_NERRNO(pipe2(return_pipe, O_CLOEXEC|O_NONBLOCK));
                r = RET_NERRNO(pipe2(json_pipe, O_CLOEXEC|O_NONBLOCK));
                        size_t len = strlen(buf);

                        if (len > COREDUMP_PIPE_MAX) {
                                /* This is iffy. A backtrace can be a few hundred kilobytes, but too much is
                                 * too much. Let's log a warning and ignore the rest. */
                                log_warning("Generated backtrace is %zu bytes (more than the limit of %u bytes), backtrace will be truncated.",
                                            len, COREDUMP_PIPE_MAX);
                                len = COREDUMP_PIPE_MAX;
                        }

                        /* Bump the space for the returned string.
                         * Failure is ignored, because partial output is still useful. */
                        (void) fcntl(return_pipe[1], F_SETPIPE_SZ, len);

                        r = loop_write(return_pipe[1], buf, len, false);
                        if (r == -EAGAIN)
                                log_warning("Write failed, backtrace will be truncated.");
                        else if (r < 0)
                        /* Bump the space for the returned string. We don't know how much space we'll need in
                         * advance, so we'll just try to write as much as possible and maybe fail later. */
                        (void) fcntl(json_pipe[1], F_SETPIPE_SZ, COREDUMP_PIPE_MAX);

                        r = json_variant_dump(package_metadata, JSON_FORMAT_FLUSH, json_out, NULL);
                        if (r < 0)
                                log_warning_errno(r, "Failed to write JSON package metadata, ignoring: %m");
                        log_warning_errno(r, "Failed to read or parse json metadata, ignoring: %m");