CVE-2021-47460

ocfs2: fix data corruption after conversion from inline format

published May 22, 2024

CVSS
—
EPSS
0%
Percentile
10.7
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

ocfs2: fix data corruption after conversion from inline format

Commit 6dbf7bb55598 ("fs: Don't invalidate page buffers in

block_write_full_page()") uncovered a latent bug in ocfs2 conversion

from inline inode format to a normal inode format.

The code in ocfs2_convert_inline_data_to_extents() attempts to zero out

the whole cluster allocated for file data by grabbing, zeroing, and

dirtying all pages covering this cluster. However these pages are

beyond i_size, thus writeback code generally ignores these dirty pages

and no blocks were ever actually zeroed on the disk.

This oversight was fixed by commit 693c241a5f6a ("ocfs2: No need to zero

pages past i_size.") for standard ocfs2 write path, inline conversion

path was apparently forgotten; the commit log also has a reasoning why

the zeroing actually is not needed.

After commit 6dbf7bb55598, things became worse as writeback code stopped

invalidating buffers on pages beyond i_size and thus these pages end up

with clean PageDirty bit but with buffers attached to these pages being

still dirty. So when a file is converted from inline format, then

writeback triggers, and then the file is grown so that these pages

become valid, the invalid dirtiness state is preserved,

mark_buffer_dirty() does nothing on these pages (buffers are already

dirty) but page is never written back because it is clean. So data

written to these pages is lost once pages are reclaimed.

Simple reproducer for the problem is:

xfs_io -f -c "pwrite 0 2000" -c "pwrite 2000 2000" -c "fsync" \

-c "pwrite 4000 2000" ocfs2_file

After unmounting and mounting the fs again, you can observe that end of

'ocfs2_file' has lost its contents.

Fix the problem by not doing the pointless zeroing during conversion

from inline format similarly as in the standard write path.

[[email protected]: fix whitespace, per Joseph]

The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00210 · 10.7th percentile
Published
2024-05-22T06:23Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 22 MAY 06:23Z
    ocfs2: fix data corruption after conversion from inline format
    cvelistv5