[Linux-kernel-mentees] [PATCH 0/3] Prevent out-of-bounds access for built-in font data buffers

[Peilin Ye]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 01:52:11PM +0200, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 01:25:14PM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 12:56 PM Peilin Ye <yepeilin.cs at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Yes, and built-in fonts don't use refcount. Or maybe we can let
> > > find_font() and get_default_font() kmalloc() a copy of built-in font
> > > data, then keep track of refcount for both user and built-in fonts, but
> > > that will waste a few K of memory for each built-in font we use...
> > 
> > A possible trick for this would be to make sure built-in fonts start
> > out with a refcount of 1. So never get freed. Plus maybe a check that
> > if the name is set, then it's a built-in font and if we ever underflow
> > the refcount we just WARN, but don't free anything.
> > 
> > Another trick would be kern_font_get/put wrappers (we'd want those
> > anyway if the userspace fonts are refcounted) and if kern_font->name
> > != NULL (i.e. built-in font with name) then we simply don't call
> > kref_get/put.
> 
> Ick, don't do that, the first trick of having them start out with an
> increased reference count is the best way here.  Makes the code simpler
> and no special cases for the tear-down path.

I see, I'll just let them start out with 1, and only check `->name !=
NULL` in kern_font_put(). Thank you!

Peilin Ye