BaseFortify

Publication date: 2025-10-01

Last updated on: 2025-10-02

Assigner: kernel.org

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ext4: improve error handling from ext4_dirhash() The ext4_dirhash() will *almost* never fail, especially when the hash tree feature was first introduced. However, with the addition of support of encrypted, casefolded file names, that function can most certainly fail today. So make sure the callers of ext4_dirhash() properly check for failures, and reflect the errors back up to their callers.

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Meta Information

Published

2025-10-01

Last Modified

2025-10-02

Generated

2026-07-06

AI Q&A

2025-10-01

EPSS Evaluated

2026-07-05

NVD

CVE-2023-53473

Affected Vendors & Products

Vendor	Product	Version / Range
linux	linux_kernel	From 5.15.160 (inc) to 5.16 (inc)

Helpful Resources

Exploitability

CWE

KEV

CWE ID	Description
CWE-UNKNOWN

Attack-Flow Graph

Executive Summary

This vulnerability involves the ext4_dirhash() function in the Linux kernel's ext4 filesystem. Originally, ext4_dirhash() almost never failed, but with the addition of support for encrypted, casefolded file names, it can now fail. The issue was that callers of ext4_dirhash() did not properly check for these failures, potentially leading to unhandled errors. The vulnerability was resolved by improving error handling to ensure failures are properly detected and propagated.

Impact Analysis

If the ext4_dirhash() function fails and the errors are not properly handled, it could lead to unexpected behavior or instability in the filesystem operations that rely on this function. This might result in data access issues or corruption when dealing with encrypted or casefolded file names on ext4 filesystems.

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