Vulnerability in Linux

CVE-2024-35860

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bpf: support deferring bpf_link dealloc to after RCU grace period BPF link for some program types is passed as a "context" which can be used by those BPF programs to look up additional information. E.g., for multi-kprobes and multi-uprobes, link is used to fetch BPF cookie values. Because of this runtime dependency, when bpf_link refcnt drops to zero there could still be active BPF programs running accessing link data. This patch adds generic support to defer bpf_link dealloc callback to after RCU GP, if requested. This is done by exposing two different deallocation callbacks, one synchronous and one deferred. If deferred one is provided, bpf_link_free() will schedule dealloc_deferred() callback to happen after RCU GP. BPF is using two flavors of RCU: "classic" non-sleepable one and RCU tasks trace one. The latter is used when sleepable BPF programs are used. bpf_link_free() accommodates that by checking underlying BPF program's sleepable flag, and goes either through normal RCU GP only for non-sleepable, or through RCU tasks trace GP *and* then normal RCU GP (taking into account rcu_trace_implies_rcu_gp() optimization), if BPF program is sleepable. We use this for multi-kprobe and multi-uprobe links, which dereference link during program run. We also preventively switch raw_tp link to use deferred dealloc callback, as upcoming changes in bpf-next tree expose raw_tp link data (specifically, cookie value) to BPF program at runtime as well.

Published 2024-05-19 · last modified 2026-08-04.