This issue tracker has been migrated to GitHub, and is currently read-only.
For more information, see the GitHub FAQs in the Python's Developer Guide.

Author Yonatan Goldschmidt
Recipients Yonatan Goldschmidt
Date 2020-01-18.17:30:10
SpamBayes Score -1.0
Marked as misclassified Yes
Message-id <1579368612.83.0.483106486083.issue39382@roundup.psfhosted.org>
In-reply-to
Content
I encountered a crash using rpyc. Since rpyc is pure-Python, I guessed the problem is with Python itself.

Originally tested on v3.7, the rest of this issue is based on v3.9.0a2 (compiling on an Ubuntu 18.04 docker).

I narrowed down the rpyc-based snippet to this:

    # server side
    class X: pass
    x_instance = X()

    from rpyc.core import SlaveService
    from rpyc.utils.classic import DEFAULT_SERVER_PORT
    from rpyc.utils.server import ThreadedServer
    t = ThreadedServer(SlaveService, port=DEFAULT_SERVER_PORT, reuse_addr=True)
    t.start()

    # client side
    import rpyc
    conn = rpyc.classic.connect("localhost")
    x = conn.modules.__main__.x_instance
    y = x.__class__
    issubclass(y, int)

Client side gets a SIGSEGV in `_PyObject_LookupAttr`, dereferencing an invalid `tp` pointer read from a posioned `v` object.

After some reference count debugging, I found that for the rpyc `y` object (in the client code), accessing `__bases__` returns a tuple with refcount=1, and it has a single item whose refcount is 1 as well.

abstract_issubclass() calls abstract_get_bases() to get this refcount=1 tuple, and in the fastpath for single inheritance (tuple size = 1) it loads the single item from the tuple (`derived = PyTuple_GET_ITEM(bases, 0)`) and then decrements the refcount on the tuple, effectively deallocating the tuple and the `derived` object (whose only reference was from the tuple).

I tried to mimic the Python magic rpyc does to get the same crash without rpyc, and reached the following snippet (which doesn't exhibit the problem):

    class Meta(type):
        def __getattribute__(self, attr):
            if attr == "__bases__":
                class Base: pass
                return (Base, )
            return type.__getattribute__(self, attr)

    class X(metaclass=Meta):
        pass

    issubclass(X().__class__, int)

In this case, the refcount is decremented from 4 to 3 as abstract_issubclass() gets rid of the tuple (instead of from 1 to 0 as happens in the rpyc case). I don't know how rpyc does it.

Attached is a patch that solves the problem (takes a ref of the tuple item before releasing the ref of the tuple itself).
I'm not sure this change is worth the cost because, well, I don't fully understand the severity of it since I couldn't reproduce it without using rpyc. I assume dynamically-created, unreferenced `__bases__` tuples as I have here are not so common.

Anyway, if you do decide it's worth it, I'd be happy to improve the patch (it's quite messy the way this function is structured) and post it to GitHub :)

Yonatan
History
Date User Action Args
2020-01-18 17:30:12Yonatan Goldschmidtsetrecipients: + Yonatan Goldschmidt
2020-01-18 17:30:12Yonatan Goldschmidtsetmessageid: <1579368612.83.0.483106486083.issue39382@roundup.psfhosted.org>
2020-01-18 17:30:12Yonatan Goldschmidtlinkissue39382 messages
2020-01-18 17:30:11Yonatan Goldschmidtcreate