CVE-2022-50428

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

ext4: fix off-by-one errors in fast-commit block filling

Due to several different off-by-one errors, or perhaps due to a late change in design that wasnt fully reflected in the code that was actually merged, there are several very strange constraints on how fast-commit blocks are filled with tlv entries:

• tlvs must start at least 10 bytes before the end of the block, even though the minimum tlv length is 8. Otherwise, the replay code will ignore them. (BUG: ext4_fc_reserve_space() could violate this requirement if called with a len of blocksize - 9 or blocksize - 8. Fortunately, this doesnt seem to happen currently.)

• tlvs must end at least 1 byte before the end of the block. Otherwise the replay code will consider them to be invalid. This quirk contributed to a bug (fixed by an earlier commit) where uninitialized memory was being leaked to disk in the last byte of blocks.

Also, strangely these constraints dont apply to the replay code in e2fsprogs, which will accept any tlvs in the blocks (with no bounds checks at all, but that is a separate issue…).

Given that this all seems to be a bug, lets fix it by just filling blocks with tlv entries in the natural way.

Note that old kernels will be unable to replay fast-commit journals created by kernels that have this commit.

Weakness

A product calculates or uses an incorrect maximum or minimum value that is 1 more, or 1 less, than the correct value.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/18f28f13301d1afb8cea9c4ddcecdbff14488ec6
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/48a6a66db82b8043d298a630f22c62d43550cae5
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5439ad45c0d0c8db41eb6f4dce6f778f15a5ee16
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5ca65dffdead16572ca046c43fb576b227f7f635