Re: [RFC PATCH] audit: fix auditd/kernel connection state tracking

From: Paul Moore <paul(a)paul-moore.com&gt; What started as a rather straightforward race condition reported by Dmitry using the syzkaller fuzzer ended up revealing some major problems with how the audit subsystem managed its netlink sockets and its connection with the userspace audit daemon. Fixing this properly had quite the cascading effect and what we are left with is this rather large and complicated patch. My initial goal was to try and decompose this patch into multiple smaller patches, but the way these changes are intertwined makes it difficult to split these changes into meaningful pieces that don't break or somehow make things worse for the intermediate states. The patch makes a number of changes, but the most significant are highlighted below: * The auditd tracking variables, e.g. audit_sock, are now gone and replaced by a RCU/spin_lock protected variable auditd_conn which is a structure containing all of the auditd tracking information. * We no longer track the auditd sock directly, instead we track it via the network namespace in which it resides and we use the audit socket associated with that namespace. In spirit, this is what the code was trying to do prior to this patch (at least I think that is what the original authors intended), but it was done rather poorly and added a layer of obfuscation that only masked the underlying problems. * Big backlog queue cleanup, again. In v4.10 we made some pretty big changes to how the audit backlog queues work, here we haven't changed the queue design so much as cleaned up the implementation. Brought about by the locking changes, we've simplified kauditd_thread() quite a bit by consolidating the queue handling into a new helper function, kauditd_send_queue(), which allows us to eliminate a lot of very similar code and makes the looping logic in kauditd_thread() clearer. * All netlink messages sent to auditd are now sent via auditd_send_unicast_skb(). Other than just making sense, this makes the lock handling easier. * Change the audit_log_start() sleep behavior so that we never sleep on auditd events (unchanged) or if the caller is holding the audit_cmd_mutex (changed). Previously we didn't sleep if the caller was auditd or if the message type fell between a certain range; the type check was a poor effort of doing what the cmd_mutex check now does. Richard Guy Briggs originally proposed not sleeping the cmd_mutex owner several years ago but his patch wasn't acceptable at the time. At least the idea lives on here. * A problem with the lost record counter has been resolved. Steve Grubb and I both happened to notice this problem and according to some quick testing by Steve, this problem goes back quite some time. It's largely a harmless problem, although it may have left some careful sysadmins quite puzzled. Cc: <stable(a)vger.kernel.org&gt; # 4.10.x- Reported-by: Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov(a)google.com&gt; Signed-off-by: Paul Moore <paul(a)paul-moore.com&gt; --- kernel/audit.c | 639 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------------- kernel/audit.h | 9 - kernel/auditsc.c | 6 - 3 files changed, 399 insertions(+), 255 deletions(-)