Bug 2395291 (CVE-2023-53172)

Summary: CVE-2023-53172 kernel: fsverity: reject FS_IOC_ENABLE_VERITY on mode 3 fds
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
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OS: Linux   
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-09-15 15:05:44 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

fsverity: reject FS_IOC_ENABLE_VERITY on mode 3 fds

Commit 56124d6c87fd ("fsverity: support enabling with tree block size <
PAGE_SIZE") changed FS_IOC_ENABLE_VERITY to use __kernel_read() to read
the file's data, instead of direct pagecache accesses.

An unintended consequence of this is that the
'WARN_ON_ONCE(!(file->f_mode & FMODE_READ))' in __kernel_read() became
reachable by fuzz tests.  This happens if FS_IOC_ENABLE_VERITY is called
on a fd opened with access mode 3, which means "ioctl access only".

Arguably, FS_IOC_ENABLE_VERITY should work on ioctl-only fds.  But
ioctl-only fds are a weird Linux extension that is rarely used and that
few people even know about.  (The documentation for FS_IOC_ENABLE_VERITY
even specifically says it requires O_RDONLY.)  It's probably not
worthwhile to make the ioctl internally open a new fd just to handle
this case.  Thus, just reject the ioctl on such fds for now.