CVE-2023-53798 — ethtool: Fix uninitialized number of lanes

Affected: Linux

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

ethtool: Fix uninitialized number of lanes

It is not possible to set the number of lanes when setting link modes using the legacy IOCTL ethtool interface. Since 'struct ethtool_link_ksettings' is not initialized in this path, drivers receive an uninitialized number of lanes in 'struct ethtool_link_ksettings::lanes'.

When this information is later queried from drivers, it results in the ethtool code making decisions based on uninitialized memory, leading to the following KMSAN splat [1]. In practice, this most likely only happens with the tun driver that simply returns whatever it got in the set operation.

As far as I can tell, this uninitialized memory is not leaked to user space thanks to the 'ethtool_ops->cap_link_lanes_supported' check in linkmodes_prepare_data().

Fix by initializing the structure in the IOCTL path. Did not find any more call sites that pass an uninitialized structure when calling 'ethtool_ops::set_link_ksettings()'.

[1] BUG: KMSAN: uninit-value in ethnl_update_linkmodes net/ethtool/linkmodes.c:273 [inline] BUG: KMSAN: uninit-value in ethnl_set_linkmodes+0x190b/0x19d0 net/ethtool/linkmodes.c:333 ethnl_update_linkmodes net/ethtool/linkmodes.c:273 [inline] ethnl_set_linkmodes+0x190b/0x19d0 net/ethtool/linkmodes.c:333 ethnl_default_set_doit+0x88d/0xde0 net/ethtool/netlink.c:640 genl_family_rcv_msg_doit net/netlink/genetlink.c:968 [inline] genl_family_rcv_msg net/netlink/genetlink.…

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CVE-2023-53798 — ethtool: Fix uninitialized number of lanes