A crafted NTFS3 disk image triggers an in-kernel infinite loop at mount time, hanging the mounting thread and firing the soft-lockup watchdog within ~22s on multi-CPU hosts (panic with kernel.softlockup_panic=1). The bug is reachable from desktop USB auto-mount on distributions where udisks2 routes the NTFS signature to the in-tree ntfs3 driver (Arch family and an increasing fraction of Fedora / openSUSE / RHEL deployments); CAP_SYS_ADMIN-class manual mount elsewhere. check_rstbl()'s second walker iterates the free-entry singly-linked list headed by rt->first_free with no upper bound on iteration count: for (off = ff; off;) { if (off == RESTART_ENTRY_ALLOCATED) return false; off = le32_to_cpu(*(__le32 *)Add2Ptr(rt, off)); if (off > ts - sizeof(__le32)) return false; } The existing guards cover three exits: end-of-list (off == 0), the in-use marker (off == RESTART_ENTRY_ALLOCATED), and out-of-bounds (off > ts - sizeof(__le32)). None of the three prevents an in-bounds cycle. A crafted on-disk RESTART_TABLE whose free chain contains a self-loop or A->B->A cycle whose offsets satisfy: - in range [sizeof(struct RESTART_TABLE), ts - sizeof(__le32)] - (off - sizeof(struct RESTART_TABLE)) % rsize == 0 passes all existing guards and spins the mount-time thread forever. Reproduced in UML by hand-forging a 2 MB NTFS3 image whose journal RESTART_TABLE first_free = 0x18 and whose entry at offset 0x18 stores 0x18 as its next pointer; mount of the forged image with the in-tree ntfs3 driver never returns. Bound the walker by rt->used. Each entry on a legitimate free chain is unique, and the total slot count is ne = le16_to_cpu (rt->used). A traversal that visits more than ne slots is by construction malformed; reject it as a corrupt RESTART_TABLE. After this patch, mount of the forged image returns with -EINVAL and a log_replay failure message, and mkntfs-produced legitimate images mount cleanly (verified in the same UML harness). Fixes: b46acd6a6a62 ("fs/ntfs3: Add NTFS journal") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Michael Bommarito Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 --- fs/ntfs3/fslog.c | 13 ++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/fs/ntfs3/fslog.c b/fs/ntfs3/fslog.c index acfa18b84401e..d3d808d644dbf 100644 --- a/fs/ntfs3/fslog.c +++ b/fs/ntfs3/fslog.c @@ -764,8 +764,19 @@ static bool check_rstbl(const struct RESTART_TABLE *rt, size_t bytes) /* * Walk through the list headed by the first entry to make * sure none of the entries are currently being used. + * + * Bound traversal by ne (rt->used) to defeat a crafted on-disk + * cycle in the free chain. Each entry in a legitimate free + * list is unique, so a chain that visits more than ne slots + * is malformed. Without this guard, an attacker-controlled + * RESTART_TABLE with a self-loop or A->B->A cycle whose + * offsets satisfy the existing alignment + in-bounds guards + * spins forever at mount time. */ - for (off = ff; off;) { + for (off = ff, i = 0; off; i++) { + if (i > ne) + return false; + if (off == RESTART_ENTRY_ALLOCATED) return false; -- 2.53.0