CVE-2023-53618 PUBLISHED

btrfs: reject invalid reloc tree root keys with stack dump

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 07.10.2025 Published: 07.10.2025 Updated: 07.10.2025

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

btrfs: reject invalid reloc tree root keys with stack dump

[BUG] Syzbot reported a crash that an ASSERT() got triggered inside prepare_to_merge().

That ASSERT() makes sure the reloc tree is properly pointed back by its subvolume tree.

[CAUSE] After more debugging output, it turns out we had an invalid reloc tree:

BTRFS error (device loop1): reloc tree mismatch, root 8 has no reloc root, expect reloc root key (-8, 132, 8) gen 17

Note the above root key is (TREE_RELOC_OBJECTID, ROOT_ITEM, QUOTA_TREE_OBJECTID), meaning it's a reloc tree for quota tree.

But reloc trees can only exist for subvolumes, as for non-subvolume trees, we just COW the involved tree block, no need to create a reloc tree since those tree blocks won't be shared with other trees.

Only subvolumes tree can share tree blocks with other trees (thus they have BTRFS_ROOT_SHAREABLE flag).

Thus this new debug output proves my previous assumption that corrupted on-disk data can trigger that ASSERT().

[FIX] Besides the dedicated fix and the graceful exit, also let tree-checker to check such root keys, to make sure reloc trees can only exist for subvolumes.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 to 314135b7bae9618a317874ae195272682cf2d5d4 (excl.)
  • affected from 1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 to 3ae93b316ca4b8b3c33798ef1d210355f2fb9318 (excl.)
  • affected from 1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 to 84256e00eeca73c529fc6196e478cc89b8098157 (excl.)
  • affected from 1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 to 6ebcd021c92b8e4b904552e4d87283032100796d (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • unaffected from 5.15.127 to 5.15.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.1.46 to 6.1.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.4.11 to 6.4.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.5 to * (incl.)

References