CVE: CVE-2023-52933
Published: 2025-03-27
Description: In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

Squashfs: fix handling and sanity checking of xattr_ids count

A Sysbot [1] corrupted filesystem exposes two flaws in the handling and
sanity checking of the xattr_ids count in the filesystem.  Both of these
flaws cause computation overflow due to incorrect typing.

In the corrupted filesystem the xattr_ids value is[PII_REDACTED], which
stored in a signed variable becomes the negative number -225.

Flaw 1 (64-bit systems only):

The signed integer xattr_ids variable causes sign extension.

This causes variable overflow in the SQUASHFS_XATTR_*(A) macros.  The
variable is first multiplied by sizeof(struct squashfs_xattr_id) where the
type of the sizeof operator is "unsigned long".

On a 64-bit system this is 64-bits in size, and causes the negative number
to be sign extended and widened to 64-bits and then become unsigned.  This
produces the very large number[PII_REDACTED][PII_REDACTED] or 2^64 - 3600.  This
number when rounded up by SQUASHFS_METADATA_SIZE - 1 (8191 bytes) and
divided by SQUASHFS_METADATA_SIZE overflows and produces a length of 0
(stored in len).

Flaw 2 (32-bit systems only):

On a 32-bit system the integer variable is not widened by the unsigned
long type of the sizeof operator (32-bits), and the signedness of the
variable has no effect due it always being treated as unsigned.

The above corrupted xattr_ids value of[PII_REDACTED], when multiplied
overflows and produces the number[PII_REDACTED] or 2^32 - 3400.  This number
when rounded up by SQUASHFS_METADATA_SIZE - 1 (8191 bytes) and divided by
SQUASHFS_METADATA_SIZE overflows again and produces a length of 0.

The effect of the 0 length computation:

In conjunction with the corrupted xattr_ids field, the filesystem also has
a corrupted xattr_table_start value, where it matches the end of
filesystem value of 850.

This causes the following sanity check code to fail because the
incorrectly computed len of 0 matches the incorrect size of the table
reported by the superblock (0 bytes).

    len = SQUASHFS_XATTR_BLOCK_BYTES(*xattr_ids);
    indexes = SQUASHFS_XATTR_BLOCKS(*xattr_ids);

    /*
     * The computed size of the index table (len bytes) should exactly
     * match the table start and end points
    */
    start = table_start + sizeof(*id_table);
    end = msblk->bytes_used;

    if (len != (end - start))
            return ERR_PTR(-EINVAL);

Changing the xattr_ids variable to be "usigned int" fixes the flaw on a
64-bit system.  This relies on the fact the computation is widened by the
unsigned long type of the sizeof operator.

Casting the variable to u64 in the above macro fixes this flaw on a 32-bit
system.

It also means 64-bit systems do not implicitly rely on the type of the
sizeof operator to widen the computation.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[PII_REDACTED]00cd44f005f1a0f17f@google.com/
CVSS Score: 5.5 (MEDIUM)
CWE: CWE-190
References: https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1369322c1de52c7b9b988b95c9903110a4566778; https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5c4d4a83bf1a862d80c1efff1c6e3ce33b501e2e; https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7fe583c9bec10cd4b76231c51b37f3e4ca646e01