f_hid backports for Linux 4.14.190 (SM-A525F)

Three fixes to drivers/usb/gadget/function/f_hid.c, carried by hand to a 4.14.190 Android vendor kernel and verified on the device they run on.

4.14 is end-of-life. No stable backport exists for any of these, and none is coming. That is the whole reason this repository exists: the device is mine, and one of these defects was resetting it.

To be precise about who maintains what: the NetHunter tree this is built from (AzeAstro/samsung_kernel_sm7125, branch OneUI-6) is actively maintained, and that work is not in question here. But it is device and NetHunter enablement — the base stays pinned at Samsung's 4.14.190 vendor drop. Nobody is carrying 4.14.y stable security fixes down into it, and Samsung is not shipping them either — 4.14.y itself ended at 4.14.336 on 10 January 2024, and the series is no longer listed among kernel.org's supported releases. That gap is what these three patches sit in.

What I did, and what I did not do

I did not discover these vulnerabilities. All three are published, with upstream patches written by other people, credited below. What I did:

1. Established that this tree is in the affected range.
2. Carried each fix to a codebase with no vendor support, where the upstream patch does not apply cleanly and the surrounding primitives differ.
3. Verified each one by effect on the running hardware where the hardware can observe it — and said so plainly where it cannot.

Point 3 is the part I would ask a reader to weigh. Two of these are confirmed by measurement against a baseline. The third is not, and cannot be, on this device. That distinction is kept throughout rather than smoothed over.

The three fixes

1 — f_hidg lifetime vs cdev

f_hidg_open stored the f_hidg * and took no reference. f_hidg_poll registered poll waiters on wait queues embedded in the kzalloc'd f_hidg. hidg_unbind called cdev_del(), which does not invalidate open fds, and hidg_free then kfree'd the object. Nothing refcounted it against open files — a whole-file grep for refcount|kref|atomic_|open_count found only opts->lock.

So a select()/poll() loop on /dev/hidg0 that survived Android re-composing the gadget would call remove_wait_queue() on freed slab, take spin_lock_irqsave on a garbage ticket word, and spin with IRQs masked forever. The local timer stops, the watchdog pet thread is never woken, and the non-secure watchdog barks ~11 s later. In practice: the handset hard-resets. Android's UsbDeviceManager re-composes on its own — measured twice at ~550 ms — with no user action, so this needed no exotic trigger.

Upstream fix: "usb: gadget: f_hid: fix f_hidg lifetime vs cdev", John Keeping, 2022-11-22, Fixes: 71adf1189469. The backport is clean — every primitive exists at 4.14.190 — except the patch's kfree(hidg->set_report_buf), a field this version lacks, which is dropped.

2 — CVE-2026-31721

CVSS 3.1 5.5, vector AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H. hidg_bind re-initialised state belonging to the object's lifetime, not the bind's: two spinlocks, two wait queue heads, and a list head, none of which appear in hidg_alloc. init_waitqueue_head resets the list head to self-pointing, so a poll/select waiter registered before a rebind is silently orphaned, and its poll_freewait → remove_wait_queue then finds prev->next wrong.

Upstream moves nine initialisations out of hidg_bind; only five of them exist at 4.14.190.

⚠ Several vendor advisories title this "privilege escalation". The vector is C:N/I:N/A:H — availability only, i.e. a local denial of service. I flag it because the scarier reading would have justified a priority the vector does not support, and nobody asks a vendor page to prove itself.

This patch also goes one step past upstream. Moving the initialisations out of hidg_bind leaves two unlocked stores to lock-protected fields, masked today only because the lock was being re-initialised immediately above them. Once the lock is persistent the race is real: a writer blocked in f_hidg_write's wait loop, on an fd that survived the unbind, can take the lock, pass the check and read hidg->req while bind stores NULL outside it — the re-check comes after the dereference. So the patch takes write_spinlock around both stores.

The general form is worth stating: moving an initialisation out of bind can create a race that the re-initialisation was hiding. Ask what the removed init was accidentally protecting.

3 — CVE-2026-31606

CVSS 5.5, same vector. struct cdev cdev is embedded in struct f_hidg, and hidg_bind called cdev_init() on it — which is memset(cdev, 0, sizeof *cdev) plus kobject_init — immediately before cdev_device_add. An open fd holds a reference on that same kobject via chrdev_open → cdev_get → kobject_get_unless_zero. On unbind→rebind with an fd open, bind wipes live reference state on a referenced object.

The fix is a struct change rather than a guard: the embedded struct cdev becomes a struct cdev * with a per-bind cdev_alloc(). cdev_init then appears zero times in the file — there is no in-use object left to re-initialise.

⛔ This device cannot detect this defect, before or after the fix. See verification/03-cve-2026-31606.md. That is a positive claim about the device's instrumentation, not a hedge.

Verification

Method and per-defect records in verification/. The short version: fixes 1 and 2 were closed by single-variable regression against the immediately prior build, with positive controls, and fix 2 was confirmed a second time from a different log source. Fix 3 is evidenced by source reading only.

Applying

Patches are git format-patch output against a 4.14.190 Samsung vendor tree, in order:

git am patches/0001-*.patch patches/0002-*.patch patches/0003-*.patch

They are cumulative and expect to be applied in sequence — 3 assumes the struct as 1 left it.

Licence

GPL-2.0, as derivative works of the Linux kernel. See LICENSE. Upstream authorship of the original fixes is credited above; the backporting, the added locking in patch 2, and the verification work are mine.

No compiled artifacts are distributed here — no kernel image, no modules, no flashable package. This repository is source and evidence only.