In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
perf: Fix event leak upon exit
When a task is scheduled out, pending sigtrap deliveries are deferred to the target task upon resume to userspace via task_work.
However failures while adding an event's callback to the task_work engine are ignored. And since the last call for events exit happen after task work is eventually closed, there is a small window during which pending sigtrap can be queued though ignored, leaking the event refcount addition such as in the following scenario:
TASK A
-----
do_exit()
exit_task_work(tsk);
<IRQ>
perf_event_overflow()
event->pending_sigtrap = pending_id;
irq_work_queue(&event->pending_irq);
</IRQ>
=========> PREEMPTION: TASK A -> TASK B
event_sched_out()
event->pending_sigtrap = 0;
atomic_long_inc_not_zero(&event->refcount)
// FAILS: task work has exited
task_work_add(&event->pending_task)
[...]
<IRQ WORK>
perf_pending_irq()
// early return: event->oncpu = -1
</IRQ WORK>
[...]
=========> TASK B -> TASK A
perf_event_exit_task(tsk)
perf_event_exit_event()
free_event()
WARN(atomic_long_cmpxchg(&event->refcount, 1, 0) != 1)
// leak event due to unexpected refcount == 2
As a result the event is never released while the task exits.
Fix this with appropriate taskworkadd()'s error handling.