CVE-2023-52933

Squashfs: fix handling and sanity checking of xattr_ids count

published March 27, 2025

CVSS
—
EPSS
0%
Percentile
17.9
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

Squashfs: fix handling and sanity checking of xattr_ids count

A Sysbot [1] corrupted filesystem exposes two flaws in the handling and

sanity checking of the xattr_ids count in the filesystem. Both of these

flaws cause computation overflow due to incorrect typing.

In the corrupted filesystem the xattr_ids value is 4294967071, which

stored in a signed variable becomes the negative number -225.

Flaw 1 (64-bit systems only):

The signed integer xattr_ids variable causes sign extension.

This causes variable overflow in the SQUASHFS_XATTR_*(A) macros. The

variable is first multiplied by sizeof(struct squashfs_xattr_id) where the

type of the sizeof operator is "unsigned long".

On a 64-bit system this is 64-bits in size, and causes the negative number

to be sign extended and widened to 64-bits and then become unsigned. This

produces the very large number 18446744073709548016 or 2^64 - 3600. This

number when rounded up by SQUASHFS_METADATA_SIZE - 1 (8191 bytes) and

divided by SQUASHFS_METADATA_SIZE overflows and produces a length of 0

(stored in len).

Flaw 2 (32-bit systems only):

On a 32-bit system the integer variable is not widened by the unsigned

long type of the sizeof operator (32-bits), and the signedness of the

variable has no effect due it always being treated as unsigned.

The above corrupted xattr_ids value of 4294967071, when multiplied

overflows and produces the number 4294963696 or 2^32 - 3400. This number

when rounded up by SQUASHFS_METADATA_SIZE - 1 (8191 bytes) and divided by

SQUASHFS_METADATA_SIZE overflows again and produces a length of 0.

The effect of the 0 length computation:

In conjunction with the corrupted xattr_ids field, the filesystem also has

a corrupted xattr_table_start value, where it matches the end of

filesystem value of 850.

This causes the following sanity check code to fail because the

incorrectly computed len of 0 matches the incorrect size of the table

reported by the superblock (0 bytes).

len = SQUASHFS_XATTR_BLOCK_BYTES(*xattr_ids);

indexes = SQUASHFS_XATTR_BLOCKS(*xattr_ids);

/*

* The computed size of the index table (len bytes) should exactly

* match the table start and end points

*/

start = table_start + sizeof(*id_table);

end = msblk->bytes_used;

if (len != (end - start))

return ERR_PTR(-EINVAL);

Changing the xattr_ids variable to be "usigned int" fixes the flaw on a

64-bit system. This relies on the fact the computation is widened by the

unsigned long type of the sizeof operator.

Casting the variable to u64 in the above macro fixes this flaw on a 32-bit

system.

It also means 64-bit systems do not implicitly rely on the type of the

sizeof operator to widen the computation.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/

The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00267 · 17.9th percentile
Published
2025-03-27T16:37Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 27 MAR 16:37Z
    Squashfs: fix handling and sanity checking of xattr_ids count
    cvelistv5