In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
perf: Fix event leak upon exit
When a task is scheduled out, pending sigtrap deliveries are deferred to the target task upon resume to userspace via task_work.
However failures while adding an event's callback to the task_work engine are ignored. And since the last call for events exit happen after task work is eventually closed, there is a small window during which pending sigtrap can be queued though ignored, leaking the event refcount addition such as in the following scenario:
TASK A -----
do_exit() exit_task_work(tsk);
perf_event_overflow() event->pending_sigtrap = pending_id; irq_work_queue(&event->pending_irq); =========> PREEMPTION: TASK A -> TASK B event_sched_out() event->pending_sigtrap = 0; atomic_long_inc_not_zero(&event->refcount) // FAILS: task work has exited task_work_add(&event->pending_task) [...] perf_pending_irq() // early return: event->oncpu = -1 [...] =========> TASK B -> TASK A perf_event_exit_task(tsk) perf_event_exit_event() free_event() WARN(atomic_long_cmpxchg(&event->refcount, 1, 0) != 1) // leak event due to unexpected refcount == 2
As a result the event is never released while the task exits.
Fix this with appropriate task_work_add()'s error handling.