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In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: serial: core: Clearing the circular buffer before NULLifying it The circular buffer is NULLified in uart_tty_port_shutdown() under the spin lock. However, the PM or other timer based callbacks may still trigger after this event without knowning that buffer pointer is not valid. Since the serial code is a bit inconsistent in checking the buffer state (some rely on the head-tail positions, some on the buffer pointer), it's better to have both aligned, i.e. buffer pointer to be NULL and head-tail possitions to be the same, meaning it's empty. This will prevent asynchronous calls to dereference NULL pointer as reported recently in 8250 case: BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 00000cf5 Workqueue: pm pm_runtime_work EIP: serial8250_tx_chars (drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250_port.c:1809) ... ? serial8250_tx_chars (drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250_port.c:1809) __start_tx (drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250_port.c:1551) serial8250_start_tx (drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250_port.c:1654) serial_port_runtime_suspend (include/linux/serial_core.h:667 drivers/tty/serial/serial_port.c:63) __rpm_callback (drivers/base/power/runtime.c:393) ? serial_port_remove (drivers/tty/serial/serial_port.c:50) rpm_suspend (drivers/base/power/runtime.c:447) The proposed change will prevent ->start_tx() to be called during suspend on shut down port.
CVSS 3.1 Base Score 5.5. CVSS Attack Vector: local. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).
While there are no complete fixes aside from conscientious programming, the following steps will go a long way to ensure that NULL pointer dereferences do not occur.
}
/* make use of pointer1 *//* ... */If you are working with a multithreaded or otherwise asynchronous environment, ensure that proper locking APIs are used to lock before the if statement; and unlock when it has finished.
This example takes an IP address from a user, verifies that it is well formed and then looks up the hostname and copies it into a buffer.
}
strcpy(hostname, hp->h_name);/*routine that ensures user_supplied_addr is in the right format for conversion */If an attacker provides an address that appears to be well-formed, but the address does not resolve to a hostname, then the call to gethostbyaddr() will return NULL. Since the code does not check the return value from gethostbyaddr (CWE-252), a NULL pointer dereference would then occur in the call to strcpy().
Note that this example is also vulnerable to a buffer overflow (see CWE-119).
In the following code, the programmer assumes that the system always has a property named "cmd" defined. If an attacker can control the program's environment so that "cmd" is not defined, the program throws a NULL pointer exception when it attempts to call the trim() method.
cmd = cmd.trim();This application has registered to handle a URL when sent an intent:
}......
}
}int length = URL.length();...The application assumes the URL will always be included in the intent. When the URL is not present, the call to getStringExtra() will return null, thus causing a null pointer exception when length() is called.
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