CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-47128 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bpf, lockdown, audit: Fix buggy SELinux lockdown permission checks Commit 59438b46471a ("security,lockdown,selinux: implement SELinux lockdown") added an implementation of the locked_down LSM hook to SELinux, with the aim to restrict which domains are allowed to perform operations that would breach lockdown. This is indirectly also getting audit subsystem involved to report events. The latter is problematic, as reported by Ondrej and Serhei, since it can bring down the whole system via audit: 1) The audit events that are triggered due to calls to security_locked_down() can OOM kill a machine, see below details [0]. 2) It also seems to be causing a deadlock via avc_has_perm()/slow_avc_audit() when trying to wake up kauditd, for example, when using trace_sched_switch() tracepoint, see details in [1]. Triggering this was not via some hypothetical corner case, but with existing tools like runqlat & runqslower from bcc, for example, which make use of this tracepoint. Rough call sequence goes like: rq_lock(rq) -> -------------------------+ trace_sched_switch() -> | bpf_prog_xyz() -> +-> deadlock selinux_lockdown() -> |…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-03-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-667

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 5.13

Showing 2 representative product identities from 6 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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