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Date:   Tue, 1 Aug 2023 11:11:17 +0300
From:   Leon Romanovsky <leon@kernel.org>
To:     Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Cc:     Lin Ma <linma@zju.edu.cn>, davem@davemloft.net,
        edumazet@google.com, pabeni@redhat.com, fw@strlen.de,
        yang.lee@linux.alibaba.com, jgg@ziepe.ca, markzhang@nvidia.com,
        phaddad@nvidia.com, yuancan@huawei.com, ohartoov@nvidia.com,
        chenzhongjin@huawei.com, aharonl@nvidia.com,
        netdev@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH net v1 1/2] netlink: let len field used to parse
 type-not-care nested attrs
Message-ID: <20230801081117.GA53714@unreal>
References: <20230731121247.3972783-1-linma@zju.edu.cn>
 <20230731120326.6bdd5bf9@kernel.org>
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On Mon, Jul 31, 2023 at 12:03:26PM -0700, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Jul 2023 20:12:47 +0800 Lin Ma wrote:
> > In short, the very direct idea to fix such lengh-check-forgotten bug is
> > add nla_len() checks like
> > 
> >   if (nla_len(nla) < SOME_LEN)
> >     return -EINVAL;
> > 
> > However, this is tedious and just like Leon said: add another layer of
> > cabal knowledge. The better solution should leverage the nla_policy and
> > discard nlattr whose length is invalid when doing parsing. That is, we
> > should defined a nested_policy for the X above like
> 
> Hard no. Putting array index into attr type is an advanced case and the
> parsing code has to be able to deal with low level netlink details.

Jakub,

IMHO, you are lowering too much the separation line between simple vs.
advanced use cases. 

I had no idea that my use-case of passing nested netlink array is counted
as advanced usage.

Thanks