CVE-2009-2698: udp_sendmsg() vulnerability

EDIT: p0c73n1 has posted an exploit for this to milw0rm as did andi@void.at, and spender wrote "the rebel"

Tavis Ormandy and myself have recently reported CVE-2009-2698 which has been disclosed at the beginning of the week.

This flaw affects at least Linux 2.6 with a version < 2.6.19.

When we ran into this, we realized the newest kernel versions were not affected by the PoC code we had. The reason for this was that Herbert Xu had found and corrected a closely related bug. Linux distributions running on 2.6.18 and earlier kernels did not realize the security impact of this fix and did not backport it.
This is a good example on how hard it is to backport relevant fixes to maintained stable versions of the kernel.

If you look at udp_sendmsg, you will see that the rt routing table is initialized as NULL and some code paths can lead to call ip_append_data with a NULL rt. ip_append_data() obviously doesn't handle this case properly and will cause a NULL pointer dereference.

Note that this is a data NULL pointer dereference and mapping code at page zero will not lead to immediate privileged code execution for a local attacker. However, controlling the rtable structure seems to give enough control to the attacker to elevate privileges.

Since it's hard to guarantee that ip_append_data will never be called with a NULL *rtp, we believe that this function should be made more robust by using this patch.

Here's one way to trigger this vulnerability locally:

$ cat croissant.c
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int fd = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, 0);
char buf[1024] = {0};
struct sockaddr to = {
.sa_family = AF_UNSPEC,
.sa_data = "TavisIsAwesome",
};

sendto(fd, buf, 1024, MSG_PROXY | MSG_MORE, &to, sizeof(to));
sendto(fd, buf, 1024, 0, &to, sizeof(to));

return 0;
}

An effective implementation of mmap_min_addr or the UDEREF feature of PaX/GrSecurity would prevent local privilege escalation through this issue.