CVE-2026-43359: btrfs: fix transaction abort on set received ioctl due to item overflow

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: 2026-05-08 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-191

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: btrfs: fix transaction abort on set received ioctl due to item overflow If the set received ioctl fails due to an item overflow when attempting to add the BTRFS_UUID_KEY_RECEIVED_SUBVOL we have to abort the transaction since we did some metadata updates before. This means that if a user calls this ioctl with the same received UUID field for a lot of subvolumes, we will hit the overflow, trigger the transaction abort and turn the filesystem into RO mode. A malicious user could exploit this, and this ioctl does not even requires that a user has admin privileges (CAP_SYS_ADMIN), only that he/she owns the subvolume. Fix this by doing an early check for item overflow before starting a transaction. This is also race safe because we are holding the subvol_sem semaphore in exclusive (write) mode. A test case for fstests will follow soon.

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 3.12 before 6.1.167; from 6.2 before 6.6.130; from 6.7 before 6.12.78; from 6.13 before 6.18.19; from 6.19 before 6.19.9; 7.0-rc1, 7.0-rc2, 7.0-rc3 — fixed in 6.1.167, 6.12.78, 6.18.19, 6.19.9, 6.6.130

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.1.167, 6.12.78, 6.18.19, 6.19.9. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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