CVE-2023-53513: nbd: fix incomplete validation of ioctl arg

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2025-10-01 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-674

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: nbd: fix incomplete validation of ioctl arg We tested and found an alarm caused by nbd_ioctl arg without verification. The UBSAN warning calltrace like below: UBSAN: Undefined behaviour in fs/buffer.c:1709:35 signed integer overflow: -9223372036854775808 - 1 cannot be represented in type 'long long int' CPU: 3 PID: 2523 Comm: syz-executor.0 Not tainted 4.19.90 #1 Hardware name: linux,dummy-virt (DT) Call trace: dump_backtrace+0x0/0x3f0 arch/arm64/kernel/time.c:78 show_stack+0x28/0x38 arch/arm64/kernel/traps.c:158 __dump_stack lib/dump_stack.c:77 [inline] dump_stack+0x170/0x1dc lib/dump_stack.c:118 ubsan_epilogue+0x18/0xb4 lib/ubsan.c:161 handle_overflow+0x188/0x1dc lib/ubsan.c:192 __ubsan_handle_sub_overflow+0x34/0x44 lib/ubsan.c:206 __block_write_full_page+0x94c/0xa20 fs/buffer.c:1709 block_write_full_page+0x1f0/0x280 fs/buffer.c:2934 blkdev_writepage+0x34/0x40 fs/block_dev.c:607 __writepage+0x68/0xe8 mm/page-writeback.c:2305 write_cache_pages+0x44c/0xc70 mm/page-writeback.c:2240 generic_writepages+0xdc/0x148 mm/page-writeback.c:2329 blkdev_writepages+0x2c/0x38 fs/block_dev.c:2114 do_writepages+0xd4/0x250 mm/page-writeback.c:2344 The reason for triggering this warning is __block_write_full_page() -> i_size_read(inode) - 1 overflow. inode->i_size is assigned in __nbd_ioctl() -> nbd_set_size() -> bytesize. We think it is necessary to limit the size of arg to prevent errors. Moreover, __nbd_ioctl() -> nbd_add_socket(), arg will be cast to int. Assuming the value of arg is 0x80000000000000001) (on a 64-bit machine), it will become 1 after the coercion, which will return unexpected results. Fix it by adding checks to prevent passing in too large numbers.

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 4.1 before 5.15.113; from 5.16 before 6.1.30; from 6.2 before 6.3.4 — fixed in 5.15.113, 6.1.30, 6.3.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.15.113, 6.1.30, 6.3.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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