[Patch included] nspluginwrapper has a race condition on NPP_Destroy and may crash Flash

Bug #724587 reported by David Benjamin
10
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
nspluginwrapper (Fedora)
Fix Released
Undecided
nspluginwrapper (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: nspluginwrapper

nspluginwrapper has a race condition during NPP_Destroy (called when a tab is closed) that can crash the plugin. The race happens particularly often when another tab has a video playing; I suspect this is because it causes enough traffic over the IPC to delay the processes and trigger the race.

If NPP_Destroy is called by the wrapper process at the same time the viewer (plugin) process makes some call, then, from the plugin's perspective, its call to NPN_InvalidateRect resulted in the plugin instance being destroyed from under its feet. This is, of course, nonsense, so Flash shortly crashes to let us know how silly we are being. :-)

I've written patches for this issue here
https://github.com/davidben/nspluginwrapper/commits/master

Only the second of the two patches is strictly relevant; the other is a separate race I came across in a previous iteration of this patch. It detects when NPP_Destroy is being called at an unsafe point and delays it to another message loop iteration. With the caveat that requests can't be reordered. So, when it must, the patch lies to the wrapper about NPP_Destroy's return values. Any delayed NPSavedData gets discarded. That said, I've never seen Flash use this feature, and the docs do allow the browser to discard them arbitrarily.

The relevant bug in Chromium is here:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=53940

(To be thorough, this is on nspluginwrapper 1.2.2-0ubuntu7 on google-chrome-beta 10.0.648.82-r75062 on Ubuntu maverick. I've also reproduced this crash in Firefox, and a cursory look at Debian stable's nspluginwrapper 1.3.0-1 suggests the bug is there too...)

As far as I can tell, nspluginwrapper no longer has an upstream. If that's not the case, this patch should probably be forward.

Tags: patch
Revision history for this message
David Benjamin (davidben) wrote :

This is the first of two patches in the linked git repo. (The formatting might look off because nspluginwrapper assumes tabs are 4 spaces. It's kind of obnoxious.)

Revision history for this message
David Benjamin (davidben) wrote :

And this is the second.

Revision history for this message
In , David (david-redhat-bugs) wrote :

This is the same report as https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nspluginwrapper/+bug/724587 on Ubuntu; I'm filing here too because, as far as I can tell, nspluginwrapper no longer has an upstream.
---

nspluginwrapper has a race condition during NPP_Destroy (called when a tab is closed) that can crash the plugin. The race happens particularly often when another tab has a video playing; I suspect this is because it causes enough traffic over the IPC to delay the processes and trigger the race.

If NPP_Destroy is called by the wrapper process at the same time the viewer (plugin) process makes some call, then, from the plugin's perspective, its call to NPN_InvalidateRect resulted in the plugin instance being destroyed from under its feet. This is, of course, nonsense, so Flash shortly crashes to let us know how silly we are being. :-)

I've written patches for this issue here
https://github.com/davidben/nspluginwrapper/commits/master

Only the second of the two patches is strictly relevant. (The other is a separate race I came across in a previous iteration of this patch.) It detects when NPP_Destroy is being called at an unsafe point and delays it to another message loop iteration. With the caveat that requests can't be reordered. So, when it must, the patch lies to the wrapper about NPP_Destroy's return values. Any delayed NPSavedData gets discarded. That said, I've never seen Flash use this feature, and the docs do allow the browser to discard them arbitrarily.

The relevant bug in Chromium is here:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=53940

tags: added: patch
Revision history for this message
In , Peter (peter-redhat-bugs) wrote :

Created attachment 482872
Delay calls to NPP_Destroy when the plugin instance is on the stack.

Delay calls to NPP_Destroy when the plugin instance is on the stack

Otherwise, from the plugin's perspective, NPN_InvalidateRect results in
the plugin instance exploding. One can hardly blame Adobe that Flash
crashes in this situation.

Unfortunately, because we attempt to speak synchronous NPAPI on both
ends and there's the additional SYNC mechanism forcing a particular
order, we cannot reorder the calls. As a result, when NPP_Destroy must
be delayed, we lie to the browser and actually destroy the plugin later.
This means, however, that any NPSavedData provided by the plugin is
ignored. In this case, a warning is emitted.

We do a slightly more conservative check and delay whenever we have any
invoke on the call stack, be it this instance or any other. This is
better than checking the refcount because any NPObjectInfo will hold a
reference.

Revision history for this message
In , Peter (peter-redhat-bugs) wrote :

Created attachment 482873
Make delayed_calls_process re-entrant

And I also attach all the other relevant patches.

Revision history for this message
In , Peter (peter-redhat-bugs) wrote :

Created attachment 482874
Delay calls to NPP_Destroy when the plugin instance is on the stack

Revision history for this message
In , Peter (peter-redhat-bugs) wrote :

Created attachment 482875
Delay calls to NPP_Destroy when the plugin instance is on the stack.

Revision history for this message
In , Fedora (fedora-redhat-bugs) wrote :

nspluginwrapper-1.3.0-18.fc15 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 15.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/nspluginwrapper-1.3.0-18.fc15

Revision history for this message
In , Fedora (fedora-redhat-bugs) wrote :

nspluginwrapper-1.3.0-18.fc15 has been pushed to the Fedora 15 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

Revision history for this message
David Benjamin (davidben) wrote :

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=680279

The patched has made it into Fedora.

Revision history for this message
Anders Kaseorg (andersk) wrote :

Here’s a debdiff including those patches. It also fixes a FTBFS due to a configure test broken by the libxt multiarch transition.

Revision history for this message
Michael Terry (mterry) wrote :

Thanks, David and Anders! I pushed this to Ubuntu.

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package nspluginwrapper - 1.2.2-0ubuntu9

---------------
nspluginwrapper (1.2.2-0ubuntu9) natty; urgency=low

  [ David Benjamin ]
  * Fix a re-entrancy bug with delayed_calls_process and a race condition
    (causing a crash) when a plugin instance is destroyed. (LP: #724587)
    - add debian/patches/008_delayed_calls_process_reentrant.diff
    - add debian/patches/009_npp_destroy_crash.diff
    - update debian/patches/series

  [ Anders Kaseorg ]
  * Fix FTBFS due to configure test broken by libxt multiarch transition.
    - add debian/patches/010_fix_Xt_test.diff
    - update debian/patches/series
  * Update Maintainer to Ubuntu Developers
    <email address hidden>.
 -- Anders Kaseorg <email address hidden> Tue, 29 Mar 2011 14:33:16 -0400

Changed in nspluginwrapper (Ubuntu):
status: New → Fix Released
Changed in nspluginwrapper (Fedora):
importance: Unknown → Undecided
status: Unknown → Fix Released
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