Overview
About vulnerability
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
ext4: make sure the first directory block is not a hole
The syzbot constructs a directory that has no dirblock but is non-inline, i.e. the first directory block is a hole. And no errors are reported when creating files in this directory in the following flow.
ext4_mknod … ext4_add_entry // Read block 0 ext4_read_dirblock(dir, block, DIRENT) bh = ext4_bread(NULL, inode, block, 0) if (!bh && (type == INDEX || type == DIRENT_HTREE)) // The first directory block is a hole // But type == DIRENT, so no error is reported.
After that, we get a directory block without ‘.’ and ‘..’ but with a valid dentry. This may cause some code that relies on dot or dotdot (such as make_indexed_dir()) to crash.
Therefore when ext4_read_dirblock() finds that the first directory block is a hole report that the filesystem is corrupted and return an error to avoid loading corrupted data from disk causing something bad.
Details
- Affected product:
- AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , Ubuntu 16.04 ELS , Ubuntu 18.04 ELS
- Affected packages:
- linux @ 4.15.0 (+3 more)
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
ext4: make sure the first directory block is not a hole
The syzbot constructs a directory that has no dirblock but is non-inline, i.e. the first directory block is a hole. And no errors are reported when creating files in this directory in the following flow.
ext4_mknod … ext4_add_entry // Read block 0 ext4_read_dirblock(dir, block, DIRENT) bh = ext4_bread(NULL, inode, block, 0) if (!bh && (type == INDEX || type == DIRENT_HTREE)) // The first directory block is a hole // But type == DIRENT, so no error is reported.
After that, we get a directory block without ‘.’ and ‘..’ but with a valid dentry. This may cause some code that relies on dot or dotdot (such as make_indexed_dir()) to crash.
Therefore when ext4_read_dirblock() finds that the first directory block is a hole report that the filesystem is corrupted and return an error to avoid loading corrupted data from disk causing something bad.