CVE-2023-53337

Updated on 17 Sep 2025

Severity

5.5 Medium severity

Details

CVSS score
5.5
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Overview

About vulnerability

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

nilfs2: do not write dirty data after degenerating to read-only

According to syzbot’s report, mark_buffer_dirty() called from nilfs_segctor_do_construct() outputs a warning with some patterns after nilfs2 detects metadata corruption and degrades to read-only mode.

After such read-only degeneration, page cache data may be cleared through nilfs_clear_dirty_page() which may also clear the uptodate flag for their buffer heads. However, even after the degeneration, log writes are still performed by unmount processing etc., which causes mark_buffer_dirty() to be called for buffer heads without the “uptodate” flag and causes the warning.

Since any writes should not be done to a read-only file system in the first place, this fixes the warning in mark_buffer_dirty() by letting nilfs_segctor_do_construct() abort early if in read-only mode.

This also changes the retry check of nilfs_segctor_write_out() to avoid unnecessary log write retries if it detects -EROFS that nilfs_segctor_do_construct() returned.

Details

Affected packages:
kernel @ 4.18.0 (+15 more)

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

nilfs2: do not write dirty data after degenerating to read-only

According to syzbot’s report, mark_buffer_dirty() called from nilfs_segctor_do_construct() outputs a warning with some patterns after nilfs2 detects metadata corruption and degrades to read-only mode.

After such read-only degeneration, page cache data may be cleared through nilfs_clear_dirty_page() which may also clear the uptodate flag for their buffer heads. However, even after the degeneration, log writes are still performed by unmount processing etc., which causes mark_buffer_dirty() to be called for buffer heads without the “uptodate” flag and causes the warning.

Since any writes should not be done to a read-only file system in the first place, this fixes the warning in mark_buffer_dirty() by letting nilfs_segctor_do_construct() abort early if in read-only mode.

This also changes the retry check of nilfs_segctor_write_out() to avoid unnecessary log write retries if it detects -EROFS that nilfs_segctor_do_construct() returned.

Fixes