CVE-2022-50277

high
Published 2024-04-30 · Modified 2024-04-30
CVSS v3
CVSS v2
VIR risk
8.0

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.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: debian — https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2022-50277

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: suse — https://www.suse.com/security/cve/CVE-2022-50277.html

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: redhat — https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:2394

OS impact

OSVersionStatusFixed in
redhat rhel9fixed
suse slesaffected
debian debianbookwormfixed6.1.4-1
debian debianbullseyefixed0
debian debianforkyfixed6.1.4-1
debian debiansidfixed6.1.4-1
debian debiantrixiefixed6.1.4-1

References

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.