vulnerability
Ubuntu: (Multiple Advisories) (CVE-2024-40955): Linux kernel vulnerabilities
| Severity | CVSS | Published | Added | Modified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | (AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:C) | Jul 12, 2024 | Sep 12, 2024 | Mar 27, 2026 |
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
ext4: fix slab-out-of-bounds in ext4_mb_find_good_group_avg_frag_lists()
We can trigger a slab-out-of-bounds with the following commands:
mkfs.ext4 -F /dev/$disk 10G
mount /dev/$disk /tmp/test
echo 2147483647 > /sys/fs/ext4/$disk/mb_group_prealloc
echo test > /tmp/test/file && sync
==================================================================
BUG: KASAN: slab-out-of-bounds in ext4_mb_find_good_group_avg_frag_lists+0x8a/0x200 [ext4]
Read of size 8 at addr ffff888121b9d0f0 by task kworker/u2:0/11
CPU: 0 PID: 11 Comm: kworker/u2:0 Tainted: GL 6.7.0-next-20240118 #521
Call Trace:
dump_stack_lvl+0x2c/0x50
kasan_report+0xb6/0xf0
ext4_mb_find_good_group_avg_frag_lists+0x8a/0x200 [ext4]
ext4_mb_regular_allocator+0x19e9/0x2370 [ext4]
ext4_mb_new_blocks+0x88a/0x1370 [ext4]
ext4_ext_map_blocks+0x14f7/0x2390 [ext4]
ext4_map_blocks+0x569/0xea0 [ext4]
ext4_do_writepages+0x10f6/0x1bc0 [ext4]
[...]
==================================================================
The flow of issue triggering is as follows:
// Set s_mb_group_prealloc to 2147483647 via sysfs
ext4_mb_new_blocks
ext4_mb_normalize_request
ext4_mb_normalize_group_request
ac->ac_g_ex.fe_len = EXT4_SB(sb)->s_mb_group_prealloc
ext4_mb_regular_allocator
ext4_mb_choose_next_group
ext4_mb_choose_next_group_best_avail
mb_avg_fragment_size_order
order = fls(len) - 2 = 29
ext4_mb_find_good_group_avg_frag_lists
frag_list = &sbi->s_mb_avg_fragment_size[order]
if (list_empty(frag_list)) // Trigger SOOB!
At 4k block size, the length of the s_mb_avg_fragment_size list is 14,
but an oversized s_mb_group_prealloc is set, causing slab-out-of-bounds
to be triggered by an attempt to access an element at index 29.
Add a new attr_id attr_clusters_in_group with values in the range
[0, sbi->s_clusters_per_group] and declare mb_group_prealloc as
that type to fix the issue. In addition avoid returning an order
from mb_avg_fragment_size_order() greater than MB_NUM_ORDERS(sb)
and reduce some useless loops.
Solutions
References
2026 Global Threat Landscape Report
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