CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-52786 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 4.7

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ext4: fix racy may inline data check in dio write syzbot reports that the following warning from ext4_iomap_begin() triggers as of the commit referenced below: if (WARN_ON_ONCE(ext4_has_inline_data(inode))) return -ERANGE; This occurs during a dio write, which is never expected to encounter an inode with inline data. To enforce this behavior, ext4_dio_write_iter() checks the current inline state of the inode and clears the MAY_INLINE_DATA state flag to either fall back to buffered writes, or enforce that any other writers in progress on the inode are not allowed to create inline data. The problem is that the check for existing inline data and the state flag can span a lock cycle. For example, if the ilock is originally locked shared and subsequently upgraded to exclusive, another writer may have reacquired the lock and created inline data before the dio write task acquires the lock and proceeds. The commit referenced below loosens the lock requirements to allow some forms of unaligned dio writes to occur under shared lock, but AFAICT the inline data check was technically already racy for any dio write that would h…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4.7 (3.1)
Published
2024-05-21
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-667

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel

Showing 1 representative product identities from 2 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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