In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: vsock/virtio: cap TX credit to local buffer size The virtio transports

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

vsock/virtio: cap TX credit to local buffer size

The virtio transports derives its TX credit directly from peer_buf_alloc,
which is set from the remote endpoint's SO_VM_SOCKETS_BUFFER_SIZE value.

On the host side this means that the amount of data we are willing to
queue for a connection is scaled by a guest-chosen buffer size, rather
than the host's own vsock configuration. A malicious guest can advertise
a large buffer and read slowly, causing the host to allocate a
correspondingly large amount of sk_buff memory.
The same thing would happen in the guest with a malicious host, since
virtio transports share the same code base.

Introduce a small helper, virtio_transport_tx_buf_size(), that
returns min(peer_buf_alloc, buf_alloc), and use it wherever we consume
peer_buf_alloc.

This ensures the effective TX window is bounded by both the peer's
advertised buffer and our own buf_alloc (already clamped to
buffer_max_size via SO_VM_SOCKETS_BUFFER_MAX_SIZE), so a remote peer
cannot force the other to queue more data than allowed by its own
vsock settings.

On an unpatched Ubuntu 22.04 host (~64 GiB RAM), running a PoC with
32 guest vsock connections advertising 2 GiB each and reading slowly
drove Slab/SUnreclaim from ~0.5 GiB to ~57 GiB; the system only
recovered after killing the QEMU process. That said, if QEMU memory is
limited with cgroups, the maximum memory used will be limited.

With this patch applied:

Before:
MemFree: ~61.6 GiB
Slab: ~142 MiB
SUnreclaim: ~117 MiB

After 32 high-credit connections:
MemFree: ~61.5 GiB
Slab: ~178 MiB
SUnreclaim: ~152 MiB

Only ~35 MiB increase in Slab/SUnreclaim, no host OOM, and the guest
remains responsive.

Compatibility with non-virtio transports:

• VMCI uses the AF_VSOCK buffer knobs to size its queue pairs per
  socket based on the local vsk->buffer_* values; the remote side
  cannot enlarge those queues beyond what the local endpoint
  configured.

• Hyper-V's vsock transport uses fixed-size VMBus ring buffers and
  an MTU bound; there is no peer-controlled credit field comparable
  to peer_buf_alloc, and the remote endpoint cannot drive in-flight
  kernel memory above those ring sizes.

• The loopback path reuses virtio_transport_common.c, so it
  naturally follows the same semantics as the virtio transport.

This change is limited to virtio_transport_common.c and thus affects
virtio-vsock, vhost-vsock, and loopback, bringing them in line with the
"remote window intersected with local policy" behaviour that VMCI and
Hyper-V already effectively have.

[Stefano: small adjustments after changing the previous patch]
[Stefano: tweak the commit message]