[PATCH 0/4] xfs: fix random format verification issues

Dave Chinner
2022-05-02T08:20:45Z

Hi folks,

This series contains a handful of fixes for the malicious format
verification attacks that were dumped into the kernel.org bugzilla
over the weekend.

I'm not going to give any credit to the reporter - they are not
disclosing these issues responsibly and so I'm not going to
encourage them by giving them any credit for causing me unnecessary
stress by forcing me to drop everything to investigate the reported
problems.

As I said back in my response to a similar malicious bug reporter
recently at https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215783 :

"If you are going to run some scripted tool to randomly
corrupt the filesystem to find failures, then you have an
ethical and moral responsibility to do some of the work to
narrow down and identify the cause of the failure, not just
throw them at someone to do all the work."

I'll add that *responsible disclosure* is also necessary. Giving us
a chance to determine the severity and impact of the format
verification/corruption problem before they are made public would
take a lot of the angst and stress out of this situation.

</rant>

Anyway, one of the bug fixes "breaks" xfs/348, which is actually
broken because it encodes observed (broken) behaviour as success
rather than encoding correct behaviour and then failing. This series
ensures that the data fork is in the correct form for symlinks,
directories and regular files and so the test now fails. Fixes for
that test will need to be done.

-Dave.