CVE-2022-50428
kernel: ext4: fix off-by-one errors in fast-commit block filling
Severity
ModerateRed Hat Product Security
CVSS 3.1
Review impact separately from score.
Published · October 1, 2025
Updated · June 30, 2026
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
ext4: fix off-by-one errors in fast-commit block filling
Due to several different off-by-one errors, or perhaps due to a late change in design that wasn't fully reflected in the code that was actually merged, there are several very strange constraints on how fast-commit blocks are filled with tlv entries:
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tlvs must start at least 10 bytes before the end of the block, even though the minimum tlv length is 8. Otherwise, the replay code will ignore them. (BUG: ext4_fc_reserve_space() could violate this requirement if called with a len of blocksize - 9 or blocksize - 8. Fortunately, this doesn't seem to happen currently.)
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tlvs must end at least 1 byte before the end of the block. Otherwise the replay code will consider them to be invalid. This quirk contributed to a bug (fixed by an earlier commit) where uninitialized memory was being leaked to disk in the last byte of blocks.
Also, strangely these constraints don't apply to the replay code in e2fsprogs, which will accept any tlvs in the blocks (with no bounds checks at all, but that is a separate issue...).
Given that this all seems to be a bug, let's fix it by just filling blocks with tlv entries in the natural way.
Note that old kernels will be unable to replay fast-commit journals created by kernels that have this commit.
CVSS score applicability
The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.
Mitigation
No mitigation is specified in collected source.
CVSS / CWE
CVSS 3.1 · 6.1CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:H
CWE-193 · Off-by-one Error