CVE-2024-36963

Technical Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

tracefs: Reset permissions on remount if permissions are options

There's an inconsistency with the way permissions are handled in tracefs.

Because the permissions are generated when accessed, they default to the

root inode's permission if they were never set by the user. If the user

sets the permissions, then a flag is set and the permissions are saved via

the inode (for tracefs files) or an internal attribute field (for

eventfs).

But if a remount happens that specify the permissions, all the files that

were not changed by the user gets updated, but the ones that were are not.

If the user were to remount the file system with a given permission, then

all files and directories within that file system should be updated.

This can cause security issues if a file's permission was updated but the

admin forgot about it. They could incorrectly think that remounting with

permissions set would update all files, but miss some.

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from linux. Update linux_kernel to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

Affected Products

References