In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
Revert "wireguard: device: enable threaded NAPI"
This reverts commit 933466fc50a8e4eb167acbd0d8ec96a078462e9c which is commit db9ae3b6b43c79b1ba87eea849fd65efa05b4b2e upstream.
We have had three independent production user reports in combination with Cilium utilizing WireGuard as encryption underneath that k8s Pod E/W traffic to certain peer nodes fully stalled. The situation appears as follows:
Occurs very rarely but at random times under heavy networking load.
Once the issue triggers the decryption side stops working completely for that WireGuard peer, other peers keep working fine. The stall happens also for newly initiated connections towards that particular WireGuard peer.
Only the decryption side is affected, never the encryption side.
Once it triggers, it never recovers and remains in this state, the CPU/mem on that node looks normal, no leak, busy loop or crash.
bpftrace on the affected system shows that wg_prev_queue_enqueue fails, thus the MAX_QUEUED_PACKETS (1024 skbs!) for the peer's rx_queue is reached.
Also, bpftrace shows that wg_packet_rx_poll for that peer is never called again after reaching this state for that peer. For other peers wg_packet_rx_poll does get called normally.
Commit db9ae3b ("wireguard: device: enable threaded NAPI") switched WireGuard to threaded NAPI by default. The default has not been changed for triggering the issue, neither did CPU hotplugging occur (i.e. 5bd8de2 ("wireguard: queueing: always return valid online CPU in wg_cpumask_choose_online()")).
The issue has been observed with stable kernels of v5.15 as well as v6.1. It was reported to us that v5.10 stable is working fine, and no report on v6.6 stable either (somewhat related discussion in [0] though).
In the WireGuard driver the only material difference between v5.10 stable and v5.15 stable is the switch to threaded NAPI by default.
[0] https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/CA+wXwBTT74RErDGAnj98PqS=wvdh8eM1pi4q6tTdExtjnokKqA@mail.gmail.com/
Breakdown of the problem:
No affected software listed.
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