CVE-2026-72193
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
ntfs3: cap RESTART_TABLE free-chain walker at rt->used
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).