CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-49913 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: btrfs: fix inode list leak during backref walking at find_parent_nodes() During backref walking, at find_parent_nodes(), if we are dealing with a data extent and we get an error while resolving the indirect backrefs, at resolve_indirect_refs(), or in the while loop that iterates over the refs in the direct refs rbtree, we end up leaking the inode lists attached to the direct refs we have in the direct refs rbtree that were not yet added to the refs ulist passed as argument to find_parent_nodes(). Since they were not yet added to the refs ulist and prelim_release() does not free the lists, on error the caller can only free the lists attached to the refs that were added to the refs ulist, all the remaining refs get their inode lists never freed, therefore leaking their memory. Fix this by having prelim_release() always free any attached inode list to each ref found in the rbtree, and have find_parent_nodes() set the ref's inode list to NULL once it transfers ownership of the inode list to a ref added to the refs ulist passed to find_parent_nodes().

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-05-01
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 6.1

Showing 2 representative product identities from 7 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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