CVE-2024-50194

Source
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-50194
Import Source
https://storage.googleapis.com/osv-test-cve-osv-conversion/osv-output/CVE-2024-50194.json
JSON Data
https://api.test.osv.dev/v1/vulns/CVE-2024-50194
Downstream
Related
Published
2024-11-08T05:54:09.327Z
Modified
2025-11-28T02:35:48.431870Z
Severity
  • 5.5 (Medium) CVSS_V3 - CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H CVSS Calculator
Summary
arm64: probes: Fix uprobes for big-endian kernels
Details

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

arm64: probes: Fix uprobes for big-endian kernels

The arm64 uprobes code is broken for big-endian kernels as it doesn't convert the in-memory instruction encoding (which is always little-endian) into the kernel's native endianness before analyzing and simulating instructions. This may result in a few distinct problems:

  • The kernel may may erroneously reject probing an instruction which can safely be probed.

  • The kernel may erroneously erroneously permit stepping an instruction out-of-line when that instruction cannot be stepped out-of-line safely.

  • The kernel may erroneously simulate instruction incorrectly dur to interpretting the byte-swapped encoding.

The endianness mismatch isn't caught by the compiler or sparse because:

  • The arch_uprobe::{insn,ixol} fields are encoded as arrays of u8, so the compiler and sparse have no idea these contain a little-endian 32-bit value. The core uprobes code populates these with a memcpy() which similarly does not handle endianness.

  • While the uprobeopcodet type is an alias for _le32, both archuprobeanalyzeinsn() and archuprobeskipsstep() cast from u8[] to the similarly-named probeopcode_t, which is an alias for u32. Hence there is no endianness conversion warning.

Fix this by changing the archuprobe::{insn,ixol} fields to _le32 and adding the appropriate _le32to_cpu() conversions prior to consuming the instruction encoding. The core uprobes copies these fields as opaque ranges of bytes, and so is unaffected by this change.

At the same time, remove MAXUINSNBYTES and consistently use AARCH64INSNSIZE for clarity.

Tested with the following:

| #include <stdio.h> | #include <stdbool.h> | | #define noinline attribute((noinline)) | | static noinline void *adrpself(void) | { | void *addr; | | asm volatile( | " adrp %x0, adrpself\n" | " add %x0, %x0, :lo12:adrpself\n" | : "=r" (addr)); | } | | | int main(int argc, char *argv) | { | void *ptr = adrpself(); | bool equal = (ptr == adrpself); | | printf("adrpself => %p\n" | "adrpself() => %p\n" | "%s\n", | adrpself, ptr, equal ? "EQUAL" : "NOT EQUAL"); | | return 0; | }

.... where the adrp_self() function was compiled to:

| 00000000004007e0 <adrp_self>: | 4007e0: 90000000 adrp x0, 400000 <__ehdr_start> | 4007e4: 911f8000 add x0, x0, #0x7e0 | 4007e8: d65f03c0 ret

Before this patch, the ADRP is not recognized, and is assumed to be steppable, resulting in corruption of the result:

| # ./adrp-self | adrpself => 0x4007e0 | adrpself() => 0x4007e0 | EQUAL | # echo 'p /root/adrp-self:0x007e0' > /sys/kernel/tracing/uprobeevents | # echo 1 > /sys/kernel/tracing/events/uprobes/enable | # ./adrp-self | adrpself => 0x4007e0 | adrp_self() => 0xffffffffff7e0 | NOT EQUAL

After this patch, the ADRP is correctly recognized and simulated:

| # ./adrp-self | adrpself => 0x4007e0 | adrpself() => 0x4007e0 | EQUAL | # | # echo 'p /root/adrp-self:0x007e0' > /sys/kernel/tracing/uprobeevents | # echo 1 > /sys/kernel/tracing/events/uprobes/enable | # ./adrp-self | adrpself => 0x4007e0 | adrp_self() => 0x4007e0 | EQUAL

Database specific
{
    "cna_assigner": "Linux",
    "osv_generated_from": "https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/tree/main/cves/2024/50xxx/CVE-2024-50194.json"
}
References

Affected packages

Git / git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git

Affected ranges

Type
GIT
Repo
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git
Events
Introduced
9842ceae9fa8deae141533d52a6ead7666962c09
Fixed
b6a638cb600e13f94b5464724eaa6ab7f3349ca2
Fixed
e6ab336213918575124d6db43dc5d3554526242e
Fixed
cf9ddf9ed94c15564a05bbf6e9f18dffa0c7df80
Fixed
cf60d19d40184e43d9a624e55a0da73be09e938d
Fixed
14841bb7a531b96e2dde37423a3b33e75147c60d
Fixed
8165bf83b8a64be801d59cd2532b0d1ffed74d00
Fixed
3d2530c65be04e93720e30f191a7cf1a3aa8b51c
Fixed
13f8f1e05f1dc36dbba6cba0ae03354c0dafcde7

Linux / Kernel

Package

Name
Kernel

Affected ranges

Type
ECOSYSTEM
Events
Introduced
4.10.0
Fixed
4.19.323
Type
ECOSYSTEM
Events
Introduced
4.20.0
Fixed
5.4.285
Type
ECOSYSTEM
Events
Introduced
5.5.0
Fixed
5.10.229
Type
ECOSYSTEM
Events
Introduced
5.11.0
Fixed
5.15.170
Type
ECOSYSTEM
Events
Introduced
5.16.0
Fixed
6.1.115
Type
ECOSYSTEM
Events
Introduced
6.2.0
Fixed
6.6.58
Type
ECOSYSTEM
Events
Introduced
6.7.0
Fixed
6.11.5