CVE-2023-53339

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:

btrfs: fix BUG_ON condition in btrfs_cancel_balance

Pausing and canceling balance can race to interrupt balance lead to BUG_ON panic in btrfs_cancel_balance. The BUG_ON condition in btrfs_cancel_balance does not take this race scenario into account.

However, the race condition has no other side effects. We can fix that.

Reproducing it with panic trace like this:

kernel BUG at fs/btrfs/volumes.c:4618! RIP: 0010:btrfs_cancel_balance+0x5cf/0x6a0 Call Trace: ? do_nanosleep+0x60/0x120 ? hrtimer_nanosleep+0xb7/0x1a0 ? sched_core_clone_cookie+0x70/0x70 btrfs_ioctl_balance_ctl+0x55/0x70 btrfs_ioctl+0xa46/0xd20 __x64_sys_ioctl+0x7d/0xa0 do_syscall_64+0x38/0x80 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x63/0xcd

Race scenario as follows:

mutex_unlock(&fs_info->balance_mutex);

…….issue pause and cancel req in another thread

ret = __btrfs_balance(fs_info);

mutex_lock(&fs_info->balance_mutex); if (ret == -ECANCELED && atomic_read(&fs_info->balance_pause_req)) { btrfs_info(fs_info, “balance: paused”); btrfs_exclop_balance(fs_info, BTRFS_EXCLOP_BALANCE_PAUSED); }

Details

Affected packages:
kernel @ 4.18.0 (+15 more)

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

btrfs: fix BUG_ON condition in btrfs_cancel_balance

Pausing and canceling balance can race to interrupt balance lead to BUG_ON panic in btrfs_cancel_balance. The BUG_ON condition in btrfs_cancel_balance does not take this race scenario into account.

However, the race condition has no other side effects. We can fix that.

Reproducing it with panic trace like this:

kernel BUG at fs/btrfs/volumes.c:4618! RIP: 0010:btrfs_cancel_balance+0x5cf/0x6a0 Call Trace: ? do_nanosleep+0x60/0x120 ? hrtimer_nanosleep+0xb7/0x1a0 ? sched_core_clone_cookie+0x70/0x70 btrfs_ioctl_balance_ctl+0x55/0x70 btrfs_ioctl+0xa46/0xd20 __x64_sys_ioctl+0x7d/0xa0 do_syscall_64+0x38/0x80 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x63/0xcd

Race scenario as follows:

mutex_unlock(&fs_info->balance_mutex);

…….issue pause and cancel req in another thread

ret = __btrfs_balance(fs_info);

mutex_lock(&fs_info->balance_mutex); if (ret == -ECANCELED && atomic_read(&fs_info->balance_pause_req)) { btrfs_info(fs_info, “balance: paused”); btrfs_exclop_balance(fs_info, BTRFS_EXCLOP_BALANCE_PAUSED); }

Fixes