Re: CVE-2024-43898 is invalid?

Greg KH
2024-09-09T16:20:13Z

On Mon, Sep 09, 2024 at 11:31:44AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> I believe CVE-2024-43898 regarding "ext4: sanity check for NULL
> pointer after ext4_force_shutdown" (commit id: 83f4414b8f84) may have
> been issued in error.
>
> ext4_force_shutdown() is called from FS_IOC_SHUTDOWN, which requires
> root privileges.

"root privileges" are not something that "is this a vulnerability"
normally takes into account given that there are zillions of ways of
giving permissions to processes to do things that people do in crazy
systems, as you know :)

That being said, the commit message does not document root priviliges
being needed, also, it looks like the function is called on the "normal"
shutdown callback for the superblock, which I don't think is required to
have root permissions, does it?

But as a maintainer, it's up to you if you wish to reject a cve for your
subsystem/code, so if you really want it rejected, we'll be glad to do
so.

thanks,

greg k-h