Re: [PATCH v2] ppp: remove the PPPIOCDETACH ioctl

On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 02:37:38PM -0700, Eric Biggers wrote:

From: Eric Biggers <redacted>

The PPPIOCDETACH ioctl effectively tries to "close" the given ppp file
before f_count has reached 0, which is fundamentally a bad idea.  It
does check 'f_count < 2', which excludes concurrent operations on the
file since they would only be possible with a shared fd table, in which
case each fdget() would take a file reference.  However, it fails to
account for the fact that even with 'f_count == 1' the file can still be
linked into epoll instances.  As reported by syzbot, this can trivially
be used to cause a use-after-free.

Yet, the only known user of PPPIOCDETACH is pppd versions older than
ppp-2.4.2, which was released almost 15 years ago (November 2003).
Also, PPPIOCDETACH apparently stopped working reliably at around the
same time, when the f_count check was added to the kernel, e.g. see
https://lkml.org/lkml/2002/12/31/83.  Also, the current 'f_count < 2'
check makes PPPIOCDETACH only work in single-threaded applications; it
always fails if called from a multithreaded application.

All pppd versions released in the last 15 years just close() the file
descriptor instead.

Therefore, instead of hacking around this bug by exporting epoll
internals to modules, and probably missing other related bugs, just
remove the PPPIOCDETACH ioctl and see if anyone actually notices.  Leave
a stub in place that prints a one-time warning and returns EINVAL.

Reported-by: syzbot+16363c99d4134717c05b@syzkaller.appspotmail.com
Fixes: 1da177e4c3f4 ("Linux-2.6.12-rc2")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers <redacted>
---

v2: leave a stub in place, rather than removing the ioctl completely.

Thanks a lot for your help on this matter.

BTW, netdev has its own rules wrt. stable backports. You didn't need to
CC: stable@. David handles -stable submissions himself.
Using a 'PATCH net' subject prefix would have made it clear that this
patch was fixing some released code and should be considered for -stable
backport.

Reviewed-by: Guillaume Nault <redacted>
Tested-by: Guillaume Nault <redacted>