CVE-2026-45892 in Linux
Résumé
par MITRE • 27/05/2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
ext4: drop extent cache after doing PARTIAL_VALID1 zeroout
When splitting an unwritten extent in the middle and converting it to initialized in ext4_split_extent() with the EXT4_EXT_MAY_ZEROOUT and EXT4_EXT_DATA_VALID2 flags set, it could leave a stale unwritten extent.
Assume we have an unwritten file and buffered write in the middle of it without dioread_nolock enabled, it will allocate blocks as written extent.
0 A B N [UUUUUUUUUUUU] on-disk extent U: unwritten extent
[UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree
[--DDDDDDDD--] D: valid data
|| ----> this range needs to be initialized
ext4_split_extent() first try to split this extent at B with EXT4_EXT_DATA_PARTIAL_VALID1 and EXT4_EXT_MAY_ZEROOUT flag set, but ext4_split_extent_at() failed to split this extent due to temporary lack of space. It zeroout B to N and leave the entire extent as unwritten.
0 A B N [UUUUUUUUUUUU] on-disk extent
[UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree
[--DDDDDDDDZZ] Z: zeroed data
ext4_split_extent() then try to split this extent at A with EXT4_EXT_DATA_VALID2 flag set. This time, it split successfully and leave an written extent from A to N.
0 A B N [UUWWWWWWWWWW] on-disk extent W: written extent
[UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree
[--DDDDDDDDZZ]
Finally ext4_map_create_blocks() only insert extent A to B to the extent status tree, and leave an stale unwritten extent in the status tree.
0 A B N [UUWWWWWWWWWW] on-disk extent W: written extent
[UUWWWWWWWWUU] extent status tree
[--DDDDDDDDZZ]
Fix this issue by always cached extent status entry after zeroing out the second part.
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