CVE-2025-37785 — ext4: fix OOB read when checking dotdot dir

Affected: Linux, Siemens SIMATIC S7-1500 CPU 1518-4 PN/DP MFP, Siemens SIMATIC S7-1500 CPU 1518F-4 PN/DP MFP, Siemens SIPLUS S7-1500 CPU 1518-4 PN/DP MFP

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ext4: fix OOB read when checking dotdot dir

Mounting a corrupted filesystem with directory which contains '.' dir entry with rec_len == block size results in out-of-bounds read (later on, when the corrupted directory is removed).

ext4_empty_dir() assumes every ext4 directory contains at least '.' and '..' as directory entries in the first data block. It first loads the '.' dir entry, performs sanity checks by calling ext4_check_dir_entry() and then uses its rec_len member to compute the location of '..' dir entry (in ext4_next_entry). It assumes the '..' dir entry fits into the same data block.

If the rec_len of '.' is precisely one block (4KB), it slips through the sanity checks (it is considered the last directory entry in the data block) and leaves "struct ext4_dir_entry_2 *de" point exactly past the memory slot allocated to the data block. The following call to ext4_check_dir_entry() on new value of de then dereferences this pointer which results in out-of-bounds mem access.

Fix this by extending __ext4_check_dir_entry() to check for '.' dir entries that reach the end of data block. Make sure to ignore the phony dir entries for checksum (by checking name_len for non-zero).

Note: This is reported by KASAN as use-after-free in case another structure was recently freed from the slot past the bound, but it is really an OOB read.

This issue was found by syzkaller tool.

Call Trace: [ 38.594108] BUG:…

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CVE-2025-37785 — ext4: fix OOB read when checking dotdot dir