Affected: Linux

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

ALSA: timer: Fix UAF at snd_timer_user_params()

At releasing a timer object, e.g. when a userspace timer (CONFIG_SND_UTIMER) gets closed and snd_timer_free() is called, it tries to detach the timer instances and release the resources. However, it's still possible that other in-flight tasks are holding the timer instance where the to-be-deleted timer object is associated, and this may lead to racy accesses.

Fortunately, most of ioctls dealing with the timer instance list already have the protection with register_mutex, and this also avoids such races. But, SNDRV_TIMER_IOCTL_PARAMS isn't protected, hence the concurrent ioctl may lead to use-after-free.

This patch just adds the guard with register_mutex to protect snd_timer_user_params() for covering the code path as a quick workaround. It's no hot-path but rather a rarely issued ioctl, so the performance penalty doesn't matter.