spi: bcm2835: Fix out-of-bounds access with more than 4 slaves

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: spi: bcm2835: Fix out-of-bounds access with more than 4 slaves Commit 571e31fa60b3 ("spi: bcm2835: Cache CS register value for ->prepare_message()") limited the number of slaves to 3 at compile-time. The limitation was necessitated by a statically-sized array prepare_cs[] in the driver private data which contains a per-slave register value. The commit sought to enforce the limitation at run-time by setting the controller's num_chipselect to 3: Slaves with a higher chipselect are rejected by spi_add_device(). However the commit neglected that num_chipselect only limits the number of native chipselects. If GPIO chipselects are specified in the device tree for more than 3 slaves, num_chipselect is silently raised by of_spi_get_gpio_numbers() and the result are out-of-bounds accesses to the statically-sized array prepare_cs[]. As a bandaid fix which is backportable to stable, raise the number of allowed slaves to 24 (which "ought to be enough for anybody"), enforce the limitation on slave ->setup and revert num_chipselect to 3 (which is the number of native chipselects supported by the controller). An upcoming for-next commit will allow an arbitrary number of slaves.

Timeline

1. May 21, 2024, 2:20 PM UTCCVE published
2. May 23, 2024, 5:10 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

3. Aug 5, 2026, 8:47 AM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• Linux Linux

  Version range not reported

• Linux Linux

  5.4

References 4