Hi, The v4.4 stable kernel (currently it's v4.4.231) lacks this bugfix: 327868212381 ("make skb_copy_datagram_msg() et.al. preserve ->msg_iter on error") , as a result, the v4.4 kernel can deliver corrupt data to the application when a corrupt UDP packet is closely followed by a valid UDP packet: when the same invocation of the recvmsg() syscall delivers the corrupt packet's UDP payload to the application's receive buffer, it provides the UDP payload length and the "from IP/Port" of the valid packet to the application -- this mismatch makes the issue worse.
Details:
For a UDP packet longer than 76 bytes (see the v5.8-rc6 kernel's include/linux/skbuff.h:3951), Linux delays the UDP checksum verification until the application invokes the syscall recvmsg().
In the recvmsg() syscall handler, while Linux is copying the UDP payload to the application's memory, it calculates the UDP checksum. If the calculated checksum doesn't match the received checksum, Linux drops the corrupt UDP packet, and then starts to process the next packet (if any), and if the next packet is valid (i.e. the checksum is correct), Linux will copy the valid UDP packet's payload to the application's receiver buffer.
The bug is: before Linux starts to copy the valid UDP packet, the data structure used to track how many more bytes should be copied to the application memory is not reset to what it was when the application just entered the kernel by the syscall! Consequently, only a small portion or none of the valid packet's payload is copied to the application's receive buffer, and later when the application exits from the kernel, actually most of the application's receive buffer contains the payload of the corrupt packet while recvmsg() returns the length of the UDP payload of the valid packet.
For the mainline kernel, the bug was fixed by Al Viro in the commit 327868212381, but unluckily the bugfix is only backported to the upstream v4.9+ kernels. I hope the bugfix can be backported to the v4.4 stable kernel, since it's a "longterm" kernel and is still used by some Linux distros.
It turns out backporting 327868212381 to v4.4 means that some Supporting patches must be backported first, so the overall changes are pretty big...
I made the below one-line workaround patch to force the recvmsg() syscall handler to return to the userspace when Linux detects a corrupt UDP packet, so the application will invoke the syscall again to receive the following valid UDP packet (note: the patch may not work well with blocking sockets, for which typically the application doesn't expect an error of -EAGAIN. I guess it would be safer to return -EINTR instead?):
--- a/net/ipv4/udp.c +++ b/net/ipv4/udp.c @@ -1367,6 +1367,7 @@ csum_copy_err: /* starting over for a new packet, but check if we need to yield */ cond_resched(); msg->msg_flags &= ~MSG_TRUNC; + return -EAGAIN; goto try_again; }
Eric Dumazet made an alternative that performs the csum validation earlier:
--- a/net/ipv4/udp.c +++ b/net/ipv4/udp.c @@ -1589,8 +1589,7 @@ int udp_queue_rcv_skb(struct sock *sk, struct sk_buff *skb) } }
- if (rcu_access_pointer(sk->sk_filter) && - udp_lib_checksum_complete(skb)) + if (udp_lib_checksum_complete(skb)) goto csum_error;
if (sk_rcvqueues_full(sk, sk->sk_rcvbuf)) {
I personally like Eric's fix and IMHO we'd better have it in v4.4 rather than trying to backport 327868212381.
Looking forward to your comments!
Thanks, Dexuan Cui