In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
netfilter: conntrack: serialize hash resizes and cleanups
Syzbot was able to trigger the following warning [1]
No repro found by syzbot yet but I was able to trigger similar issue by having 2 scripts running in parallel, changing conntrack hash sizes, and:
for j in seq 1 1000 ; do unshare -n /bin/true >/dev/null ; done
It would take more than 5 minutes for net_namespace structures to be cleaned up.
This is because nf_ct_iterate_cleanup() has to restart everytime a resize happened.
By adding a mutex, we can serialize hash resizes and cleanups and also make get_next_corpse() faster by skipping over empty buckets.
Even without resizes in the picture, this patch considerably speeds up network namespace dismantles.
[1] INFO: task syz-executor.0:8312 can't die for more than 144 seconds. task:syz-executor.0 state:R running task stack:25672 pid: 8312 ppid: 6573 flags:0x00004006 Call Trace: context_switch kernel/sched/core.c:4955 [inline] __schedule+0x940/0x26f0 kernel/sched/core.c:6236 preempt_schedule_common+0x45/0xc0 kernel/sched/core.c:6408 preempt_schedule_thunk+0x16/0x18 arch/x86/entry/thunk_64.S:35 __local_bh_enable_ip+0x109/0x120 kernel/softirq.c:390 local_bh_enable include/linux/bottom_half.h:32 [inline] get_next_corpse net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_core.c:2252 [inline] nf_ct_iterate_cleanup+0x15a/0x450 net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_core.c:2275 nf_conntrack_cleanup_net_list+0x14c/0x4f0 net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_core.c:2469 ops_exit_list+0x10d/0x160 net/core/net_namespace.c:171 setup_net+0x639/0xa30 net/core/net_namespace.c:349 copy_net_ns+0x319/0x760 net/core/net_namespace.c:470 create_new_namespaces+0x3f6/0xb20 kernel/nsproxy.c:110 unshare_nsproxy_namespaces+0xc1/0x1f0 kernel/nsproxy.c:226 ksys_unshare+0x445/0x920 kernel/fork.c:3128 __do_sys_unshare kernel/fork.c:3202 [inline] __se_sys_unshare kernel/fork.c:3200 [inline] __x64_sys_unshare+0x2d/0x40 kernel/fork.c:3200...
Exploitability
AV:LAC:HPR:LUI:NScope
S:UImpact
C:NI:NA:H4.7/CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H