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Date:   Tue, 25 Jul 2023 21:39:24 +0300
From:   Leon Romanovsky <leon@kernel.org>
To:     Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Cc:     Lin Ma <linma@zju.edu.cn>, jgg@ziepe.ca, markzhang@nvidia.com,
        michaelgur@nvidia.com, ohartoov@nvidia.com,
        chenzhongjin@huawei.com, yuancan@huawei.com,
        linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v1] RDMA/nldev: Add length check for
 IFLA_BOND_ARP_IP_TARGET parsing
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On Tue, Jul 25, 2023 at 10:14:05AM -0700, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Jul 2023 08:25:57 +0300 Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> > > Yeah I have seen that. Just as Jakub said, empty netlink attributes are valid 
> > > (they are viewed as flag). The point is that different attribute has different
> > > length requirement. For this specific code, the RDMA_NLDEV_ATTR_STAT_HWCOUNTERS
> > > attribute is a nested one whose inner attributes should be NLA_U32. But as you
> > > can see in variable nldev_policy, the description does not use nested policy to
> > > enfore that, which results in the bug discussed in my commit message.
> > > 
> > >  [RDMA_NLDEV_ATTR_STAT_HWCOUNTERS]       = { .type = NLA_NESTED },
> > > 
> > > The elegant fix could be add the nested policy description to nldev_policy while
> > > this is toublesome as no existing nla_attr has been given to this nested nlattr.
> > > Hence, add the length check is the simplest solution and you can see such nla_len
> > > check code all over the kernel.  
> > 
> > Right, and this is what bothers me.
> > 
> > I would more than happy to change nla_for_each_nested() to be something
> > like nla_for_each_nested_type(...., sizeof(u32)), which will skip empty
> > lines, for code which can't have them.
> 
> In general the idea of auto-skipping stuff kernel doesn't recognize
> is a bit old school. Better direction would be extending the policy
> validation to cover use cases for such loops.

I'm all in for any solution which will help for average developer to write
netlink code without mistakes.

Thanks