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Wrong memory orderings violates mutual exclusion in spin

High severity GitHub Reviewed Published Aug 25, 2021 to the GitHub Advisory Database • Updated Jun 22, 2023

Package

cargo spin (Rust)

Affected versions

< 0.5.2

Patched versions

0.5.2

Description

Wrong memory orderings inside the RwLock implementation allow for two writers to acquire the lock at the same time. The drop implementation used Ordering::Relaxed, which allows the compiler or CPU to reorder a mutable access on the locked data after the lock has been yielded.

Only users of the RwLock implementation are affected. Users of Once (including users of lazy_static with the spin_no_std feature enabled) are NOT affected.

On strongly ordered CPU architectures like x86, the only real way that this would lead to a memory corruption is if the compiler reorders an access after the lock is yielded, which is possible but in practice unlikely. It is a more serious issue on weakly ordered architectures such as ARM which, except in the presence of certain instructions, allow the hardware to decide which accesses are seen at what times. Therefore on an ARM system it is likely that using the wrong memory ordering would result in a memory corruption, even if the compiler itself doesn't reorder the memory accesses in a buggy way.

References

Reviewed Aug 19, 2021
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Aug 25, 2021
Last updated Jun 22, 2023

Severity

High

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

EPSS score

0.103%
(43rd percentile)

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2019-16137

GHSA ID

GHSA-hv7x-f3pv-gpwr

Source code

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