CVE-2021-47634 (Moderate severity, published 2025-02-25)
CVSS score: 6.4 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H)
CWE: CWE-416
Description: In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ubi: Fix race condition between ctrl_cdev_ioctl and ubi_cdev_ioctl

Hulk Robot reported a KASAN report about use-after-free:
 ==================================================================
 BUG: KASAN: use-after-free in __list_del_entry_valid+0x13d/0x160
 Read of size 8 at addr ffff888035e37d98 by task ubiattach/1385
 [...]
 Call Trace:
  klist_dec_and_del+0xa7/0x4a0
  klist_put+0xc7/0x1a0
  device_del+0x4d4/0xed0
  cdev_device_del+0x1a/0x80
  ubi_attach_mtd_dev+0x2951/0x34b0 [ubi]
  ctrl_cdev_ioctl+0x286/0x2f0 [ubi]

 Allocated by task 1414:
  device_add+0x60a/0x18b0
  cdev_device_add+0x103/0x170
  ubi_create_volume+0x1118/0x1a10 [ubi]
  ubi_cdev_ioctl+0xb7f/0x1ba0 [ubi]

 Freed by task 1385:
  cdev_device_del+0x1a/0x80
  ubi_remove_volume+0x438/0x6c0 [ubi]
  ubi_cdev_ioctl+0xbf4/0x1ba0 [ubi]
 [...]
 ==================================================================

The lock held by ctrl_cdev_ioctl is ubi_devices_mutex, but the lock held
by ubi_cdev_ioctl is ubi->device_mutex. Therefore, the two locks can be
concurrent.

ctrl_cdev_ioctl contains two operations: ubi_attach and ubi_detach.
ubi_detach is bug-free because it uses reference counting to prevent
concurrency. However, uif_init and uif_close in ubi_attach may race with
ubi_cdev_ioctl.

uif_init will race with ubi_cdev_ioctl as in the following stack.
           cpu1                   cpu2                  cpu3
_______________________|________________________|______________________
ctrl_cdev_ioctl
 ubi_attach_mtd_dev
  uif_init
                           ubi_cdev_ioctl
                            ubi_create_volume
                             cdev_device_add
   ubi_add_volume
   // sysfs exist
   kill_volumes
                                                    ubi_cdev_ioctl
                                                     ubi_remove_volume
                                                      cdev_device_del
                                                       // first free
    ubi_free_volume
     cdev_del
     // double free
   cdev_device_del

And uif_close will race with ubi_cdev_ioctl as in the following stack.
           cpu1                   cpu2                  cpu3
_______________________|________________________|______________________
ctrl_cdev_ioctl
 ubi_attach_mtd_dev
  uif_init
                           ubi_cdev_ioctl
                            ubi_create_volume
                             cdev_device_add
  ubi_debugfs_init_dev
  //error goto out_uif;
  uif_close
   kill_volumes
                                                    ubi_cdev_ioctl
                                                     ubi_remove_volume
                                                      cdev_device_del
                                                       // first free
    ubi_free_volume
    // double free

The cause of this problem is that commit 714fb87e8bc0 make device
"available" before it becomes accessible via sysfs. Therefore, we
roll back the modification. We will fix the race condition between
ubi device creation and udev by removing ubi_get_device in
vol_attribute_show and dev_attribute_show.This avoids accessing
uninitialized ubi_devices[ubi_num].

ubi_get_device is used to prevent devices from being deleted during
sysfs execution. However, now kernfs ensures that devices will not
be deleted before all reference counting are released.
The key process is shown in the following stack.

device_del
  device_remove_attrs
    device_remove_groups
      sysfs_remove_groups
        sysfs_remove_group
          remove_files
            kernfs_remove_by_name
              kernfs_remove_by_name_ns
                __kernfs_remove
                  kernfs_drain
Statement: If UBI being used (that is a software layer above MTD layer which admits use of LVM-like logical volumes on top of MTD devices), then bug use-after-free could happen in ubi_attach function. The additional condition is race with ubi_cdev_ioctl function. The security impact is limited, because of attack complexity and requirement to have access to UBI.
Mitigation: To mitigate this issue, prevent module ubi from being loaded. Please see https://access.redhat.com/solutions/41278 for how to blacklist a kernel module to prevent it from loading automatically.