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authorJohannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>2007-09-14 11:10:24 -0400
committerDavid S. Miller <davem@sunset.davemloft.net>2007-10-10 16:49:26 -0700
commitd4e46a3d9869563c6210b01bb651c40cbe65da80 (patch)
treed37626d8077c0eaca35ec41e705c62af2a324847 /include
parentc29b9b9b0235d56e5602f61ed38702dd376aae20 (diff)
[MAC80211]: fix race conditions with keys
During receive processing, we select the key long before using it and because there's no locking it is possible that we kfree() the key after having selected it but before using it for crypto operations. Obviously, this is bad. Secondly, during transmit processing, there are two possible races: We have a similar race between select_key() and using it for encryption, but we also have a race here between select_key() and hardware encryption (both when a key is removed.) This patch solves these issues by using RCU: when a key is to be freed, we first remove the pointer from the appropriate places (sdata->keys, sdata->default_key, sta->key) using rcu_assign_pointer() and then synchronize_rcu(). Then, we can safely kfree() the key and remove it from the hardware. There's a window here where the hardware may still be using it for decryption, but we can't work around that without having two hardware callbacks, one to disable the key for RX and one to disable it for TX; but the worst thing that will happen is that we receive a packet decrypted that we don't find a key for any more and then drop it. When we add a key, we first need to upload it to the hardware and then, using rcu_assign_pointer() again, link it into our structures. In the code using keys (TX/RX paths) we use rcu_dereference() to get the key and enclose the whole tx/rx section in a rcu_read_lock() ... rcu_read_unlock() block. Because we've uploaded the key to hardware before linking it into internal structures, we can guarantee that it is valid once get to into tx(). One possible race condition remains, however: when we have hardware acceleration enabled and the driver shuts down the queues, we end up queueing the frame. If now somebody removes the key, the key will be removed from hwaccel and then then driver will be asked to encrypt the frame with a key index that has been removed. Hence, drivers will need to be aware that the hw_key_index they are passed might not be under all circumstances. Most drivers will, however, simply ignore that condition and encrypt the frame with the selected key anyway, this only results in a frame being encrypted with a wrong key or dropped (rightfully) because the key was not valid. There isn't much we can do about it unless we want to walk the pending frame queue every time a key is removed and remove all frames that used it. This race condition, however, will most likely be solved once we add multiqueue support to mac80211 because then frames will be queued further up the stack instead of after being processed. Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net> Acked-by: Michael Wu <flamingice@sourmilk.net> Signed-off-by: John W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Diffstat (limited to 'include')
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