What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-54119: inotify: Avoid reporting event with invalid wd

• Severity: unknown
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-12-24 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: inotify: Avoid reporting event with invalid wd When inotify_freeing_mark() races with inotify_handle_inode_event() it can happen that inotify_handle_inode_event() sees that i_mark->wd got already reset to -1 and reports this value to userspace which can confuse the inotify listener. Avoid the problem by validating that wd is sensible (and pretend the mark got removed before the event got generated otherwise).

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 2.6.31 — fixed in 6.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/145f54ea336b06cf4f92eeee996f2ffca939ea43
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/17ad86d8c12220de97e80d88b5b4c934a40e1812
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2d65c97777e5b4a845637800d5d7b648f5772106
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8fb33166aed888769ea63d6af49515893f8a1f14
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a48bacee05860c6089c3482bcdc80720b0ee5732
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c915d8f5918bea7c3962b09b8884ca128bfd9b0c
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/fb3294998489d39835006240e9c6e6b2ac62022e

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