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CVE-2023-53440

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CVE-2023-53440

Published: Sep 18, 2025

Modified: May 11, 2026

PUBLISHED

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: nilfs2: fix sysfs interface lifetime The current nilfs2 sysfs support has issues with the timing of creation and deletion of sysfs entries, potentially leading to null pointer dereferences, use-after-free, and lockdep warnings. Some of the sysfs attributes for nilfs2 per-filesystem instance refer to metadata file "cpfile", "sufile", or "dat", but nilfs_sysfs_create_device_group that creates those attributes is executed before the inodes for these metadata files are loaded, and nilfs_sysfs_delete_device_group which deletes these sysfs entries is called after releasing their metadata file inodes. Therefore, access to some of these sysfs attributes may occur outside of the lifetime of these metadata files, resulting in inode NULL pointer dereferences or use-after-free. In addition, the call to nilfs_sysfs_create_device_group() is made during the locking period of the semaphore "ns_sem" of nilfs object, so the shrinker call caused by the memory allocation for the sysfs entries, may derive lock dependencies "ns_sem" -> (shrinker) -> "locks acquired in nilfs_evict_inode()". Since nilfs2 may acquire "ns_sem" deep in the call stack holding other locks via its error handler __nilfs_error(), this causes lockdep to report circular locking. This is a false positive and no circular locking actually occurs as no inodes exist yet when nilfs_sysfs_create_device_group() is called. Fortunately, the lockdep warnings can be resolved by simply moving the call to nilfs_sysfs_create_device_group() out of "ns_sem". This fixes these sysfs issues by revising where the device's sysfs interface is created/deleted and keeping its lifetime within the lifetime of the metadata files above.

VendorProductVersions

Linux

Linux

affected
dd70edbde2627f47df118d899de6bbb55abcfdbf - < d20dcec8f326deb77b6688f8441e014045dac457
affected
dd70edbde2627f47df118d899de6bbb55abcfdbf - < 5fe0ea141fbb887d407f1bf572ebf24427480d5c
affected
dd70edbde2627f47df118d899de6bbb55abcfdbf - < 83b16a60e413148685739635901937e2f16a7873
affected
dd70edbde2627f47df118d899de6bbb55abcfdbf - < 3dbee84bf9e3273c4bb9ca6fc18ff22fba23dd24
affected
dd70edbde2627f47df118d899de6bbb55abcfdbf - < d540aea451ab5489777a8156560f1388449b3109

+3 more versions

Linux

Linux

affected
3.17
unaffected
0 - < 3.17
unaffected
4.14.313 - <= 4.14.*
unaffected
4.19.281 - <= 4.19.*
unaffected
5.4.241 - <= 5.4.*

+5 more versions

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