genetlink: disallow subscribing to unknown mcast groups

Jeff Layton reported that he could trigger the multicast unbind warning
in generic netlink using trinity. I originally thought it was a race
condition between unregistering the generic netlink family and closing
the socket, but there's a far simpler explanation: genetlink currently
allows subscribing to groups that don't (yet) exist, and the warning is
triggered when unsubscribing again while the group still doesn't exist.

Originally, I had a warning in the subscribe case and accepted it out of
userspace API concerns, but the warning was of course wrong and removed
later.

However, I now think that allowing userspace to subscribe to groups that
don't exist is wrong and could possibly become a security problem:
Consider a (new) genetlink family implementing a permission check in
the mcast_bind() function similar to the like the audit code does today;
it would be possible to bypass the permission check by guessing the ID
and subscribing to the group it exists. This is only possible in case a
family like that would be dynamically loaded, but it doesn't seem like a
huge stretch, for example wireless may be loaded when you plug in a USB
device.

To avoid this reject such subscription attempts.

If this ends up causing userspace issues we may need to add a workaround
in af_netlink to deny such requests but not return an error.

Reported-by: Jeff Layton <jeff.layton@primarydata.com>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

diff --git a/net/netlink/genetlink.c b/net/netlink/genetlink.c
index 2e11061ef885562d2ff2a098448a7d9c8d1b64ee..c18d3f5624b21cfecaf688b565c9c49f741adc80 100644 (file)
--- a/net/netlink/genetlink.c
+++ b/net/netlink/genetlink.c
@@ -985,7 +985,7 @@ static struct genl_multicast_group genl_ctrl_groups[] = {
 
 static int genl_bind(struct net *net, int group)
 {
-       int i, err = 0;
+       int i, err = -ENOENT;
 
        down_read(&cb_lock);
        for (i = 0; i < GENL_FAM_TAB_SIZE; i++) {