CVE-2023-53777

erofs: kill hooked chains to avoid loops on deduplicated compressed images

published December 9, 2025

CVSS
—
EPSS
0%
Percentile
9.3
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

erofs: kill hooked chains to avoid loops on deduplicated compressed images

After heavily stressing EROFS with several images which include a

hand-crafted image of repeated patterns for more than 46 days, I found

two chains could be linked with each other almost simultaneously and

form a loop so that the entire loop won't be submitted. As a

consequence, the corresponding file pages will remain locked forever.

It can be _only_ observed on data-deduplicated compressed images.

For example, consider two chains with five pclusters in total:

Chain 1: 2->3->4->5 -- The tail pcluster is 5;

Chain 2: 5->1->2 -- The tail pcluster is 2.

Chain 2 could link to Chain 1 with pcluster 5; and Chain 1 could link

to Chain 2 at the same time with pcluster 2.

Since hooked chains are all linked locklessly now, I have no idea how

to simply avoid the race. Instead, let's avoid hooked chains completely

until I could work out a proper way to fix this and end users finally

tell us that it's needed to add it back.

Actually, this optimization can be found with multi-threaded workloads

(especially even more often on deduplicated compressed images), yet I'm

not sure about the overall system impacts of not having this compared

with implementation complexity.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00199 · 9.3th percentile
Published
2025-12-09T00:00Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 09 DEC 00:00Z
    erofs: kill hooked chains to avoid loops on deduplicated compressed images
    cvelistv5