CVE-2026-72193

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

ntfs3: cap RESTART_TABLE free-chain walker at rt->used

A crafted NTFS3 disk image triggers an in-kernel infinite loop at

mount time, hanging the mounting thread and firing the soft-lockup

watchdog within ~22s on multi-CPU hosts (panic with

kernel.softlockup_panic=1). The bug is reachable from desktop USB

auto-mount on distributions where udisks2 routes the NTFS signature

to the in-tree ntfs3 driver (Arch family and an increasing fraction

of Fedora / openSUSE / RHEL deployments); CAP_SYS_ADMIN-class manual

mount elsewhere.

check_rstbl()'s second walker iterates the free-entry singly-linked

list headed by rt->first_free with no upper bound on iteration count:

for (off = ff; off;) {

if (off == RESTART_ENTRY_ALLOCATED)

return false;

off = le32_to_cpu(*(__le32 *)Add2Ptr(rt, off));

if (off > ts - sizeof(__le32))

return false;

}

The existing guards cover three exits: end-of-list (off == 0), the

in-use marker (off == RESTART_ENTRY_ALLOCATED), and out-of-bounds

(off > ts - sizeof(__le32)). None of the three prevents an

in-bounds cycle.

A crafted on-disk RESTART_TABLE whose free chain contains a

self-loop or A->B->A cycle whose offsets satisfy:

- in range [sizeof(struct RESTART_TABLE), ts - sizeof(__le32)]

- (off - sizeof(struct RESTART_TABLE)) % rsize == 0

passes all existing guards and spins the mount-time thread forever.

Reproduced in UML by hand-forging a 2 MB NTFS3 image whose journal

RESTART_TABLE first_free = 0x18 and whose entry at offset 0x18

stores 0x18 as its next pointer; mount of the forged image with

the in-tree ntfs3 driver never returns.

Bound the walker by rt->used. Each entry on a legitimate free

chain is unique, and the total slot count is ne = le16_to_cpu

(rt->used). A traversal that visits more than ne slots is by

construction malformed; reject it as a corrupt RESTART_TABLE.

After this patch, mount of the forged image returns with -EINVAL

and a log_replay failure message, and mkntfs-produced legitimate

images mount cleanly (verified in the same UML harness).