printk: prevent userland from spoofing kernel messages

The following statement of ABI/testing/dev-kmsg is not quite right:

   It is not possible to inject messages from userspace with the
   facility number LOG_KERN (0), to make sure that the origin of the
   messages can always be reliably determined.

Userland actually can inject messages with a facility of 0 by abusing the
fact that the facility is stored in a u8 data type.  By using a facility
which is a multiple of 256 the assignment of msg->facility in log_store()
implicitly truncates it to 0, i.e.  LOG_KERN, allowing users of /dev/kmsg
to spoof kernel messages as shown below:

The following call...
   # printf '<%d>Kernel panic - not syncing: beer empty\n' 0 >/dev/kmsg
...leads to the following log entry (dmesg -x | tail -n 1):
   user  :emerg : [   66.137758] Kernel panic - not syncing: beer empty

However, this call...
   # printf '<%d>Kernel panic - not syncing: beer empty\n' 0x800 >/dev/kmsg
...leads to the slightly different log entry (note the kernel facility):
   kern  :emerg : [   74.177343] Kernel panic - not syncing: beer empty

Fix that by limiting the user provided facility to 8 bit right from the
beginning and catch the truncation early.

Fixes: 7ff9554bb578 ("printk: convert byte-buffer to variable-length...")
Signed-off-by: Mathias Krause <minipli@googlemail.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.cz>
Cc: Alex Elder <elder@linaro.org>
Cc: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Kay Sievers <kay@vrfy.org>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 file changed