CVE-2022-50277

ext4: don't allow journal inode to have encrypt flag

State
Published
Severity
Not scored
Published
Sep 15, 2025
Updated
May 11, 2026
Reserved
Sep 15, 2025

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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

ext4: don't allow journal inode to have encrypt flag

Mounting a filesystem whose journal inode has the encrypt flag causes a NULL dereference in fscrypt_limit_io_blocks() when the 'inlinecrypt' mount option is used.

The problem is that when jbd2_journal_init_inode() calls bmap(), it eventually finds its way into ext4_iomap_begin(), which calls fscrypt_limit_io_blocks(). fscrypt_limit_io_blocks() requires that if the inode is encrypted, then its encryption key must already be set up. That's not the case here, since the journal inode is never "opened" like a normal file would be. Hence the crash.

A reproducer is:

mkfs.ext4 -F /dev/vdb debugfs -w /dev/vdb -R "set_inode_field <8> flags 0x80808" mount /dev/vdb /mnt -o inlinecrypt

To fix this, make ext4 consider journal inodes with the encrypt flag to be invalid. (Note, maybe other flags should be rejected on the journal inode too. For now, this is just the minimal fix for the above issue.)

I've marked this as fixing the commit that introduced the call to fscrypt_limit_io_blocks(), since that's what made an actual crash start being possible. But this fix could be applied to any version of ext4 that supports the encrypt feature.

Scores

The record has no CVSS score.

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • 38ea50daa7a447dbcd7031f37a39a1baa163b2ab to before 1f7a6626f611aa06d7907aa45b484708dd5ac8bcAffected
  • 38ea50daa7a447dbcd7031f37a39a1baa163b2ab to before bcc5057e1781a3ee889225480d995c3b5cbde555Affected
  • 38ea50daa7a447dbcd7031f37a39a1baa163b2ab to before 105c78e12468413e426625831faa7db4284e1fecAffected
LinuxLinux
  • 5.18Affected
  • before 5.18Not affected
  • 6.0.18 through 6.0.*Not affected
  • 6.1.4 through 6.1.*Not affected
  • 6.2 and laterNot affected

References

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