Affected: Linux

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

wifi: cfg80211: regulatory: improve invalid hints checking

Syzbot keeps reporting an issue [1] that occurs when erroneous symbols sent from userspace get through into user_alpha2[] via regulatory_hint_user() call. Such invalid regulatory hints should be rejected.

While a sanity check from commit 47caf685a685 ("cfg80211: regulatory: reject invalid hints") looks to be enough to deter these very cases, there is a way to get around it due to 2 reasons.

1) The way isalpha() works, symbols other than latin lower and upper letters may be used to determine a country/domain. For instance, greek letters will also be considered upper/lower letters and for such characters isalpha() will return true as well. However, ISO-3166-1 alpha2 codes should only hold latin characters.

2) While processing a user regulatory request, between reg_process_hint_user() and regulatory_hint_user() there happens to be a call to queue_regulatory_request() which modifies letters in request->alpha2[] with toupper(). This works fine for latin symbols, less so for weird letter characters from the second part of _ctype[].

Syzbot triggers a warning in is_user_regdom_saved() by first sending over an unexpected non-latin letter that gets malformed by toupper() into a character that ends up failing isalpha() check.

Prevent this by enhancing is_an_alpha2() to ensure that incoming symbols are latin letters and nothing else.

[1] Syzbot report: -…