From: Vegard Nossum Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 05:01:51 +0000 (-0700) Subject: utsname: completely overwrite prior information X-Git-Tag: v2.6.28-rc1~524 X-Git-Url: http://pilppa.com/gitweb/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=87988815073918134c0dae059cf247a4472d78ed;p=linux-2.6-omap-h63xx.git utsname: completely overwrite prior information On sethostname() and setdomainname(), previous information may be retained if it was longer than than the new hostname/domainname. This can be demonstrated trivially by calling sethostname() first with a long name, then with a short name, and then calling uname() to retrieve the full buffer that contains the hostname (and possibly parts of the old hostname), one just has to look past the terminating zero. I don't know if we should really care that much (hence the RFC); the only scenarios I can possibly think of is administrator putting something sensitive in the hostname (or domain name) by accident, and changing it back will not undo the mistake entirely, though it's not like we can recover gracefully from "rm -rf /" either... The other scenario is namespaces (CLONE_NEWUTS) where some information may be unintentionally "inherited" from the previous namespace (a program wants to hide the original name and does clone + sethostname, but some information is still left). I think the patch may be defended on grounds of the principle of least surprise. But I am not adamant :-) (I guess the question now is whether userspace should be able to write embedded NULs into the buffer or not...) At least the observation has been made and the patch has been presented. Signed-off-by: Vegard Nossum Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" Cc: "Serge E. Hallyn" Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- diff --git a/kernel/sys.c b/kernel/sys.c index d5b79f65ad9..558b035965a 100644 --- a/kernel/sys.c +++ b/kernel/sys.c @@ -1350,7 +1350,8 @@ asmlinkage long sys_sethostname(char __user *name, int len) errno = -EFAULT; if (!copy_from_user(tmp, name, len)) { memcpy(utsname()->nodename, tmp, len); - utsname()->nodename[len] = 0; + memset(utsname()->nodename + len, 0, + sizeof(utsname()->nodename) - len); errno = 0; } up_write(&uts_sem); @@ -1396,7 +1397,8 @@ asmlinkage long sys_setdomainname(char __user *name, int len) errno = -EFAULT; if (!copy_from_user(tmp, name, len)) { memcpy(utsname()->domainname, tmp, len); - utsname()->domainname[len] = 0; + memset(utsname()->domainname + len, 0, + sizeof(utsname()->domainname) - len); errno = 0; } up_write(&uts_sem);