Bug 2420254 (CVE-2023-53777)

Summary: CVE-2023-53777 kernel: erofs: kill hooked chains to avoid loops on deduplicated compressed images
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 2025-12-09 01:03:35 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

erofs: kill hooked chains to avoid loops on deduplicated compressed images

After heavily stressing EROFS with several images which include a
hand-crafted image of repeated patterns for more than 46 days, I found
two chains could be linked with each other almost simultaneously and
form a loop so that the entire loop won't be submitted.  As a
consequence, the corresponding file pages will remain locked forever.

It can be _only_ observed on data-deduplicated compressed images.
For example, consider two chains with five pclusters in total:
	Chain 1:  2->3->4->5    -- The tail pcluster is 5;
        Chain 2:  5->1->2       -- The tail pcluster is 2.

Chain 2 could link to Chain 1 with pcluster 5; and Chain 1 could link
to Chain 2 at the same time with pcluster 2.

Since hooked chains are all linked locklessly now, I have no idea how
to simply avoid the race.  Instead, let's avoid hooked chains completely
until I could work out a proper way to fix this and end users finally
tell us that it's needed to add it back.

Actually, this optimization can be found with multi-threaded workloads
(especially even more often on deduplicated compressed images), yet I'm
not sure about the overall system impacts of not having this compared
with implementation complexity.