Amazon Linux AMI 2: CVE-2024-49861: Security patch for kernel (ALASKERNEL-5.10-2025-095)

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

bpf: Fix helper writes to read-only maps

Lonial found an issue that despite user- and BPF-side frozen BPF map
(like in case of .rodata), it was still possible to write into it from
a BPF program side through specific helpers having ARG_PTR_TO_{LONG,INT}
as arguments.

In check_func_arg() when the argument is as mentioned, the meta->raw_mode
is never set. Later, check_helper_mem_access(), under the case of
PTR_TO_MAP_VALUE as register base type, it assumes BPF_READ for the
subsequent call to check_map_access_type() and given the BPF map is
read-only it succeeds.

The helpers really need to be annotated as ARG_PTR_TO_{LONG,INT} | MEM_UNINIT
when results are written into them as opposed to read out of them. The
latter indicates that it's okay to pass a pointer to uninitialized memory
as the memory is written to anyway.

However, ARG_PTR_TO_{LONG,INT} is a special case of ARG_PTR_TO_FIXED_SIZE_MEM
just with additional alignment requirement. So it is better to just get
rid of the ARG_PTR_TO_{LONG,INT} special cases altogether and reuse the
fixed size memory types. For this, add MEM_ALIGNED to additionally ensure
alignment given these helpers write directly into the args via *<ptr> = val.
The .arg*_size has been initialized reflecting the actual sizeof(*<ptr>).

MEM_ALIGNED can only be used in combination with MEM_FIXED_SIZE annotated
argument types, since in !MEM_FIXED_SIZE cases the verifier does not know
the buffer size a priori and therefore cannot blindly write *<ptr> = val.