CVE-2023-52896 — btrfs: fix race between quota rescan and disable leading to NULL pointer deref

Affected: Linux

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

btrfs: fix race between quota rescan and disable leading to NULL pointer deref

If we have one task trying to start the quota rescan worker while another one is trying to disable quotas, we can end up hitting a race that results in the quota rescan worker doing a NULL pointer dereference. The steps for this are the following:

1) Quotas are enabled;

2) Task A calls the quota rescan ioctl and enters btrfs_qgroup_rescan(). It calls qgroup_rescan_init() which returns 0 (success) and then joins a transaction and commits it;

3) Task B calls the quota disable ioctl and enters btrfs_quota_disable(). It clears the bit BTRFS_FS_QUOTA_ENABLED from fs_info->flags and calls btrfs_qgroup_wait_for_completion(), which returns immediately since the rescan worker is not yet running. Then it starts a transaction and locks fs_info->qgroup_ioctl_lock;

4) Task A queues the rescan worker, by calling btrfs_queue_work();

5) The rescan worker starts, and calls rescan_should_stop() at the start of its while loop, which results in 0 iterations of the loop, since the flag BTRFS_FS_QUOTA_ENABLED was cleared from fs_info->flags by task B at step 3);

6) Task B sets fs_info->quota_root to NULL;

7) The rescan worker tries to start a transaction and uses fs_info->quota_root as the root argument for btrfs_start_transaction(). This results in a NULL pointer dereference down the call chain of btrfs_sta…

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CVE-2023-52896 — btrfs: fix race between quota rescan and disable leading to NULL pointer deref