In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net: ethtool: netlink: Allow NULL nlattrs when getting a phy_device
ethnlreqgetphydev() is used to lookup a phydevice, in the case an ethtool netlink command targets a specific phydev within a netdev's topology.
It takes as a parameter a const struct nlattr *header that's used for error handling :
if (!phydev) {
NL_SET_ERR_MSG_ATTR(extack, header,
"no phy matching phyindex");
return ERR_PTR(-ENODEV);
}
In the notify path after a ->set operation however, there's no request attributes available.
The typical callsite for the above function looks like:
phydev = ethnl_req_get_phydev(req_base, tb[ETHTOOL_A_XXX_HEADER],
info->extack);
So, when tb is NULL (such as in the ethnl notify path), we have a nice crash.
It turns out that there's only the PLCA command that is in that case, as the other phydev-specific commands don't have a notification.
This commit fixes the crash by passing the cmd index and the nlattr array separately, allowing NULL-checking it directly inside the helper.