Medium (5.5) in linux linux kernel. EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
btrfs: reject invalid reloc tree root keys with stack dump
[BUG]
Syzbot reported a crash that an ASSERT() got triggered inside
prepare_to_merge().
That ASSERT() makes sure the reloc tree is properly pointed back by its
subvolume tree.
[CAUSE]
After more debugging output, it turns out we had an invalid reloc tree:
BTRFS error (device loop1): reloc tree mismatch, root 8 has no reloc root, expect reloc root key (-8, 132, 8) gen 17
Note the above root key is (TREE_RELOC_OBJECTID, ROOT_ITEM,
QUOTA_TREE_OBJECTID), meaning it's a reloc tree for quota tree.
But reloc trees can only exist for subvolumes, as for non-subvolume
trees, we just COW the involved tree block, no need to create a reloc
tree since those tree blocks won't be shared with other trees.
Only subvolumes tree can share tree blocks with other trees (thus they
have BTRFS_ROOT_SHAREABLE flag).
Thus this new debug output proves my previous assumption that corrupted
on-disk data can trigger that ASSERT().
[FIX]
Besides the dedicated fix and the graceful exit, also let tree-checker to
check such root keys, to make sure reloc trees can only exist for subvolumes.
Severity
CVSS 3.1
5.5 medium
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS
0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days; higher than 10% of CVEs (scores of 2026-10-31)