published December 4, 2025
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
fs/notify: call exportfs_encode_fid with s_umount
Calling intotify_show_fdinfo() on fd watching an overlayfs inode, while
the overlayfs is being unmounted, can lead to dereferencing NULL ptr.
This issue was found by syzkaller.
Race Condition Diagram:
Thread 1 Thread 2
-------- --------
generic_shutdown_super()
shrink_dcache_for_umount
sb->s_root = NULL
|
| vfs_read()
| inotify_fdinfo()
| * inode get from mark *
| show_mark_fhandle(m, inode)
| exportfs_encode_fid(inode, ..)
| ovl_encode_fh(inode, ..)
| ovl_check_encode_origin(inode)
| * deref i_sb->s_root *
|
|
v
fsnotify_sb_delete(sb)
Which then leads to:
[ 32.133461] Oops: general protection fault, probably for non-canonical address 0xdffffc0000000006: 0000 [#1] SMP DEBUG_PAGEALLOC KASAN NOPTI
[ 32.134438] KASAN: null-ptr-deref in range [0x0000000000000030-0x0000000000000037]
[ 32.135032] CPU: 1 UID: 0 PID: 4468 Comm: systemd-coredum Not tainted 6.17.0-rc6 #22 PREEMPT(none)
<snip registers, unreliable trace>
[ 32.143353] Call Trace:
[ 32.143732] ovl_encode_fh+0xd5/0x170
[ 32.144031] exportfs_encode_inode_fh+0x12f/0x300
[ 32.144425] show_mark_fhandle+0xbe/0x1f0
[ 32.145805] inotify_fdinfo+0x226/0x2d0
[ 32.146442] inotify_show_fdinfo+0x1c5/0x350
[ 32.147168] seq_show+0x530/0x6f0
[ 32.147449] seq_read_iter+0x503/0x12a0
[ 32.148419] seq_read+0x31f/0x410
[ 32.150714] vfs_read+0x1f0/0x9e0
[ 32.152297] ksys_read+0x125/0x240
IOW ovl_check_encode_origin derefs inode->i_sb->s_root, after it was set
to NULL in the unmount path.
Fix it by protecting calling exportfs_encode_fid() from
show_mark_fhandle() with s_umount lock.
This form of fix was suggested by Amir in [1].
[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAOQ4uxhbDwhb+2Brs1UdkoF0a3NSdBAOQPNfEHjahrgoKJpLEw@mail.gmail.com/