CVE-2021-46912

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

net: Make tcp_allowed_congestion_control readonly in non-init netns

Currently, tcp_allowed_congestion_control is global and writable;
writing to it in any net namespace will leak into all other net
namespaces.

tcp_available_congestion_control and tcp_allowed_congestion_control are
the only sysctls in ipv4_net_table (the per-netns sysctl table) with a
NULL data pointer; their handlers (proc_tcp_available_congestion_control
and proc_allowed_congestion_control) have no other way of referencing a
struct net. Thus, they operate globally.

Because ipv4_net_table does not use designated initializers, there is no
easy way to fix up this one “bad” table entry. However, the data pointer
updating logic shouldn’t be applied to NULL pointers anyway, so we
instead force these entries to be read-only.

These sysctls used to exist in ipv4_table (init-net only), but they were
moved to the per-net ipv4_net_table, presumably without realizing that
tcp_allowed_congestion_control was writable and thus introduced a leak.

Because the intent of that commit was only to know (i.e. read) “which
congestion algorithms are available or allowed”, this read-only solution
should be sufficient.

The logic added in recent commit
31c4d2f160eb: (“net: Ensure net namespace isolation of sysctls”)
does not and cannot check for NULL data pointers, because
other table entries (e.g. /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_log/) have
.data=NULL but use other methods (.extra2) to access the struct net.