From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
To: linux-cve-announce@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@kernel.org>
Subject: CVE-2026-89695: nfsd: cap decoded POSIX ACL count to bound sort cost
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2026 21:46:24 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <2026091154-CVE-2026-89695-0b51@gregkh> (raw)
From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@kernel.org>
Description
===========
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
nfsd: cap decoded POSIX ACL count to bound sort cost
nfsd4_decode_posixacl() reads a u32 entry count off the wire and passes
it straight to posix_acl_alloc() and sort_pacl_range(). The latter is
an O(n^2) bubble sort, so a client-chosen count drives unbounded CPU in
the server's compound processing path.
nfsd4_decode_posixacl()
xdr_stream_decode_u32(&count) /* uncapped u32 */
posix_acl_alloc(count, GFP_KERNEL)
sort_pacl_range(*acl, 0, count - 1) /* O(n^2) bubble sort */
The encoder side in the same file already rejects ACLs whose a_count
exceeds NFS_ACL_MAX_ENTRIES, but the decoder introduced in commit
5fc51dfc2eb1 ("NFSD: Add support for XDR decoding POSIX draft ACLs")
omitted the symmetric check.
Fix by rejecting a wire count greater than NFS_ACL_MAX_ENTRIES with
nfserr_inval, before any allocation, so the sort is bounded by
NFS_ACL_MAX_ENTRIES^2 comparisons.
While we're in here, also fix the nfserr_resource return if
posix_acl_alloc() fails. That's not a legal error code for v4.1+. Change
it to return nfserr_jukebox as that's more appropriate for memory
allocation failures.
The Linux kernel CVE team has assigned CVE-2026-89695 to this issue.
Affected and fixed versions
===========================
Issue introduced in 7.0 with commit 5fc51dfc2eb160bd7ab3251ab1767cacf9c8bf05 and fixed in 7.2.4 with commit ea14d71d6ecb925673761bcf79f781f7dc9042cc
Issue introduced in 7.0 with commit 5fc51dfc2eb160bd7ab3251ab1767cacf9c8bf05 and fixed in 7.3-rc1 with commit 4bc1108e876153a2dd6d874052b99182c3603135
Please see https://www.kernel.org for a full list of currently supported
kernel versions by the kernel community.
Unaffected versions might change over time as fixes are backported to
older supported kernel versions. The official CVE entry at
https://cve.org/CVERecord/?id=CVE-2026-89695
will be updated if fixes are backported, please check that for the most
up to date information about this issue.
Affected files
==============
The file(s) affected by this issue are:
fs/nfsd/nfs4xdr.c
Mitigation
==========
The Linux kernel CVE team recommends that you update to the latest
stable kernel version for this, and many other bugfixes. Individual
changes are never tested alone, but rather are part of a larger kernel
release. Cherry-picking individual commits is not recommended or
supported by the Linux kernel community at all. If however, updating to
the latest release is impossible, the individual changes to resolve this
issue can be found at these commits:
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ea14d71d6ecb925673761bcf79f781f7dc9042cc
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4bc1108e876153a2dd6d874052b99182c3603135
reply other threads:[~2026-09-11 20:02 UTC|newest]
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