Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
crypto: af_alg - zero initialize memory allocated via sock_kmalloc
Several crypto user API contexts and requests allocated with
sock_kmalloc() were left uninitialized, relying on callers to
set fields explicitly. This resulted in the use of uninitialized
data in certain error paths or when new fields are added in the
future.
The ACVP patches also contain two user-space interface files:
algif_kpp.c and algif_akcipher.c. These too rely on proper
initialization of their context structures.
A particular issue has been observed with the newly added
'inflight' variable introduced in af_alg_ctx by commit:
67b164a871af ("crypto: af_alg - Disallow multiple in-flight AIO requests")
Because the context is not memset to zero after allocation,
the inflight variable has contained garbage values. As a result,
af_alg_alloc_areq() has incorrectly returned -EBUSY randomly when
the garbage value was interpreted as true:
https://github.com/gregkh/linux/blame/master/crypto/af_alg.c#L1209
The check directly tests ctx->inflight without explicitly
comparing against true/false. Since inflight is only ever set to
true or false later, an uninitialized value has triggered
-EBUSY failures. Zero-initializing memory allocated with
sock_kmalloc() ensures inflight and other fields start in a known
state, removing random issues caused by uninitialized data.