CVE-2021-47587
CriticalCVSS 9.8Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk43th percentile - higher than 43% of all known CVEs
Summary
In the Linux kernel, a vulnerability was found in the systemport driver due to missing global locking for the descriptor list shared across all transmit queues. Concurrent access from multiple queues can corrupt descriptors, leading to incorrect packet lengths and checksums in UDP and TCP traffic.
Risk Assessment
The risk involves potential corruption of transmitted network packets, which may cause transmission errors, data loss, or integrity issues. In production, this could lead to network service failures and hard-to-diagnose connectivity problems.
Recommendation
It is recommended to immediately update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix (commit adding global serialization for descriptor lifecycle). If updating is not possible, consider limiting the use of multiple transmit queues on systemport interfaces.
Original NVD description (English source)
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: systemport: Add global locking for descriptor lifecycle The descriptor list is a shared resource across all of the transmit queues, and the locking mechanism used today only protects concurrency across a given transmit queue between the transmit and reclaiming. This creates an opportunity for the SYSTEMPORT hardware to work on corrupted descriptors if we have multiple producers at once which is the case when using multiple transmit queues. This was particularly noticeable when using multiple flows/transmit queues and it showed up in interesting ways in that UDP packets would get a correct UDP header checksum being calculated over an incorrect packet length. Similarly TCP packets would get an equally correct checksum computed by the hardware over an incorrect packet length. The SYSTEMPORT hardware maintains an internal descriptor list that it re-arranges when the driver produces a new descriptor anytime it writes to the WRITE_PORT_{HI,LO} registers, there is however some delay in the hardware to re-organize its descriptors and it is possible that concurrent TX queues eventually break this internal allocation scheme to the point where the length/status part of the descriptor gets used for an incorrect data buffer. The fix is to impose a global serialization for all TX queues in the short section where we are writing to the WRITE_PORT_{HI,LO} registers which solves the corruption even with multiple concurrent TX queues being used.