Affected: Linux

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

ipvs: fix UB due to uninitialized stack access in ip_vs_protocol_init()

Under certain kernel configurations when building with Clang/LLVM, the compiler does not generate a return or jump as the terminator instruction for ip_vs_protocol_init(), triggering the following objtool warning during build time:

vmlinux.o: warning: objtool: ip_vs_protocol_init() falls through to next function __initstub__kmod_ip_vs_rr__935_123_ip_vs_rr_init6()

At runtime, this either causes an oops when trying to load the ipvs module or a boot-time panic if ipvs is built-in. This same issue has been reported by the Intel kernel test robot previously.

Digging deeper into both LLVM and the kernel code reveals this to be a undefined behavior problem. ip_vs_protocol_init() uses a on-stack buffer of 64 chars to store the registered protocol names and leaves it uninitialized after definition. The function calls strnlen() when concatenating protocol names into the buffer. With CONFIG_FORTIFY_SOURCE strnlen() performs an extra step to check whether the last byte of the input char buffer is a null character (commit 3009f891bb9f ("fortify: Allow strlen() and strnlen() to pass compile-time known lengths")). This, together with possibly other configurations, cause the following IR to be generated:

define hidden i32 @ip_vs_protocol_init() local_unnamed_addr #5 section ".init.text" align 16 !kcfi_type !29 { %1 = alloca [64 x i8], alig…