CVE-2022-49264 — exec: Force single empty string when argv is empty

Affected: Linux

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

exec: Force single empty string when argv is empty

Quoting[1] Ariadne Conill:

"In several other operating systems, it is a hard requirement that the second argument to execve(2) be the name of a program, thus prohibiting a scenario where argc < 1. POSIX 2017 also recommends this behaviour, but it is not an explicit requirement[2]:

The argument arg0 should point to a filename string that is associated with the process being started by one of the exec functions. ... Interestingly, Michael Kerrisk opened an issue about this in 2008[3], but there was no consensus to support fixing this issue then. Hopefully now that CVE-2021-4034 shows practical exploitative use[4] of this bug in a shellcode, we can reconsider.

This issue is being tracked in the KSPP issue tracker[5]."

While the initial code searches[6][7] turned up what appeared to be mostly corner case tests, trying to that just reject argv == NULL (or an immediately terminated pointer list) quickly started tripping[8] existing userspace programs.

The next best approach is forcing a single empty string into argv and adjusting argc to match. The number of programs depending on argc == 0 seems a smaller set than those calling execve with a NULL argv.

Account for the additional stack space in bprm_stack_limits(). Inject an empty string when argc == 0 (and set argc = 1). Warn about the case so userspace has some notice about the change:

pr…

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CVE-2022-49264 — exec: Force single empty string when argv is empty