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  • Johannes Berg's avatar
    genetlink: disallow subscribing to unknown mcast groups · 5ad63005
    Johannes Berg authored
    
    
    Jeff Layton reported that he could trigger the multicast unbind warning
    in generic netlink using trinity. I originally thought it was a race
    condition between unregistering the generic netlink family and closing
    the socket, but there's a far simpler explanation: genetlink currently
    allows subscribing to groups that don't (yet) exist, and the warning is
    triggered when unsubscribing again while the group still doesn't exist.
    
    Originally, I had a warning in the subscribe case and accepted it out of
    userspace API concerns, but the warning was of course wrong and removed
    later.
    
    However, I now think that allowing userspace to subscribe to groups that
    don't exist is wrong and could possibly become a security problem:
    Consider a (new) genetlink family implementing a permission check in
    the mcast_bind() function similar to the like the audit code does today;
    it would be possible to bypass the permission check by guessing the ID
    and subscribing to the group it exists. This is only possible in case a
    family like that would be dynamically loaded, but it doesn't seem like a
    huge stretch, for example wireless may be loaded when you plug in a USB
    device.
    
    To avoid this reject such subscription attempts.
    
    If this ends up causing userspace issues we may need to add a workaround
    in af_netlink to deny such requests but not return an error.
    
    Reported-by: default avatarJeff Layton <jeff.layton@primarydata.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJohannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    5ad63005