[alsa-devel] [PATCH] ASoC: soc-core: Add missing NULL check

[Mark Brown]

On Fri, Mar 09, 2018 at 10:45:16AM -0800, Kees Cook wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 4:50 AM, Mark Brown <broonie at kernel.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 12:06:53PM -0800, Kees Cook wrote:

> >> If a codec is not attached to the sound soc, a NULL deref is possible as a
> >> regular user in /sys.

> > I can't parse this, sorry.  What is the "sound soc"?

> SoC's sound component? I'm not sure either. :) I was just sending the
> patch that I mentioned from the thread where Pavel mentioned this
> Oops.

Oh, Pavel's thing.  I didn't look at that yet.  I'm afraid your
description still isn't making much sense to me - I'm guessing that
you're just papering over an immediate crack rather than having
analyized the situation in any depth?

> >> +     if (!codec || !codec->driver)
> >> +             return 0;

> > How are we managing to create a sysfs file for a CODEC which doesn't
> > have a CODEC struct associated with it?  That is obviously nonsensical
> > and suggests we've got some more serious problem going on here - if
> > there's no CODEC those sysfs attributes simply shouldn't be there.

> No idea! Hopefully Pavel has more details...

That's where the fix should be, it implies that there's some larger data
corruption/confusion problem somewhere else.  If we've created the file
but left a NULL pointer I'd expect that there is a good chance that
there'll be other things that think we've got a CODEC and try to
defererence the pointer, it's an assumption that's present throughout
the code.

I think I might just remove the file though, it's been non-functional on
most systems for a while now as almost all the drivers migrated to
regmap and nobody complained so we should be safe.  There's still
something that ought to be investigated here.
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