N/A - CVE-2022-49052

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm: fix unexpected zeroed page mapping with zram swap

Two processes under CLONE_VM cloning, user process can be corrupted by seeing zeroed page unexpectedly.

CPU A CPU B

do_swap_page do_swap_page
SWP_SYNCHRONOUS_IO path SWP_SYNCHRONOUS_IO path
swap_readpage valid data
swap_slot_free_notify
delete zram entry
swap_readpage zeroed(invalid) data
pte_lock
map the *zero data* to userspace
pte_unlock
pte_lock
if (!pte_same)
goto out_nomap;
pte_unlock
return and next refault will
read zeroed data

The swap_slot_free_notify is bogus for CLONE_VM case since it doesn't increase the refcount of swap slot at copy_mm so it couldn't catch up whether it's safe or not to discard data from backing device. In the case, only the lock it could rely on to synchronize swap slot freeing is page table lock. Thus, this patch gets rid of the swap_slot_free_notify function. With this patch, CPU A will see correct data.

CPU A CPU B

do_swap_page do_swap_page
SWP_SYNCHRONOUS_IO path SWP_SYNCHRONOUS_IO path
swap_readpage original data
pte_lock
map the original data
swap_free
swap_range_free
bd_disk->fops->swap_slot_free_notify
swap_readpage read zeroed data
pte_unlock
pte_lock
if (!pte_same)
goto out_nomap;
pte_unlock
return
on next refault will see mapped data by CPU B

The concern of the patch would increase memory consumption since it could keep wasted memory with compressed form in zram as well as uncompressed form in address space. However, most of cases of zram uses no readahead and do_swap_page is followed by swap_free so it will free the compressed form from in zram quickly.