vulnerability

Red Hat: CVE-2023-52779: kernel: fs: Pass AT_GETATTR_NOSEC flag to getattr interface function

Severity
5
CVSS
(AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:C)
Published
May 21, 2024
Added
Jul 9, 2025
Modified
Jul 10, 2025

Description

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

fs: Pass AT_GETATTR_NOSEC flag to getattr interface function

When vfs_getattr_nosec() calls a filesystem's getattr interface function
then the 'nosec' should propagate into this function so that
vfs_getattr_nosec() can again be called from the filesystem's gettattr
rather than vfs_getattr(). The latter would add unnecessary security
checks that the initial vfs_getattr_nosec() call wanted to avoid.
Therefore, introduce the getattr flag GETATTR_NOSEC and allow to pass
with the new getattr_flags parameter to the getattr interface function.
In overlayfs and ecryptfs use this flag to determine which one of the
two functions to call.

In a recent code change introduced to IMA vfs_getattr_nosec() ended up
calling vfs_getattr() in overlayfs, which in turn called
security_inode_getattr() on an exiting process that did not have
current->fs set anymore, which then caused a kernel NULL pointer
dereference. With this change the call to security_inode_getattr() can
be avoided, thus avoiding the NULL pointer dereference.

Solution

no-fix-redhat-rpm-package
Title
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