Medium · published August 25, 2026
The Zephyr ext2 filesystem driver validates the on-disk block bitmap in ext2_init_fs() (subsys/fs/ext2/ext2_impl.c) by passing fs_blocks = s_blocks_count - s_first_data_block to ext2_bitmap_count_set(). That helper (subsys/fs/ext2/ext2_bitmap.c) treats its argument as a number of bits and reads one bitmap byte per eight bits, but the bitmap buffer (BGROUP_BLOCK_BITMAP) is a single fetched block of only fs->block_size bytes (capacity fs->block_size * 8 bits). s_blocks_count and s_first_data_block are taken verbatim from the superblock and were never bounded against this single-group capacity; ext2_verify_disk_superblock() checks the magic, revision, and block-size shift but not the block count.
A crafted ext2 image with an oversized s_blocks_count (up to ~4 billion, against a maximum 4096-byte block / 32768-bit bitmap) makes ext2_bitmap_count_set() scan roughly 512 MB of memory past the bitmap block — a large out-of-bounds read of the static block slab and adjacent memory.
The defect is reached during mount: ext2_init_fs() is invoked from ext2_mount() (subsys/fs/ext2/ext2_ops.c), the registered .mount operation. Any path that mounts an attacker-supplied ext2 image (removable media, a disk/flash partition, or a downloaded image) triggers it. The kernel-privileged parser operates on attacker-controlled data, so the bug is exploitable wherever untrusted ext2 media can be mounted.
Impact is an out-of-bounds read only: the resulting bit count is compared internally and the mount is rejected, so no attacker-controlled bytes are returned (not a useful information leak). The ~512 MB over-read will almost certainly cross an unmapped or MPU-protected boundary and fault, crashing the system — a denial of service triggered by mounting a single malformed image. The fix rejects any image whose fs_blocks exceeds fs->block_size * 8 before the scan.