CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-71267 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: fs: ntfs3: fix infinite loop triggered by zero-sized ATTR_LIST We found an infinite loop bug in the ntfs3 file system that can lead to a Denial-of-Service (DoS) condition. A malformed NTFS image can cause an infinite loop when an ATTR_LIST attribute indicates a zero data size while the driver allocates memory for it. When ntfs_load_attr_list() processes a resident ATTR_LIST with data_size set to zero, it still allocates memory because of al_aligned(0). This creates an inconsistent state where ni->attr_list.size is zero, but ni->attr_list.le is non-null. This causes ni_enum_attr_ex to incorrectly assume that no attribute list exists and enumerates only the primary MFT record. When it finds ATTR_LIST, the code reloads it and restarts the enumeration, repeating indefinitely. The mount operation never completes, hanging the kernel thread. This patch adds validation to ensure that data_size is non-zero before memory allocation. When a zero-sized ATTR_LIST is detected, the function returns -EINVAL, preventing a DoS vulnerability.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-03-18
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel

Showing 1 representative product identities from 6 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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