Bug 2418829 (CVE-2025-40237)

Summary: CVE-2025-40237 kernel: fs/notify: call exportfs_encode_fid with s_umount
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
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Version: unspecifiedKeywords: Security
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OS: Linux   
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-12-04 16:02:54 UTC
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/