CVE-2026-72193 — ntfs3: cap RESTART_TABLE free-chain walker at rt->used

Affected: Linux

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

ntfs3: cap RESTART_TABLE free-chain walker at rt->used

A crafted NTFS3 disk image triggers an in-kernel infinite loop at mount time, hanging the mounting thread and firing the soft-lockup watchdog within ~22s on multi-CPU hosts (panic with kernel.softlockup_panic=1). The bug is reachable from desktop USB auto-mount on distributions where udisks2 routes the NTFS signature to the in-tree ntfs3 driver (Arch family and an increasing fraction of Fedora / openSUSE / RHEL deployments); CAP_SYS_ADMIN-class manual mount elsewhere.

check_rstbl()'s second walker iterates the free-entry singly-linked list headed by rt->first_free with no upper bound on iteration count:

for (off = ff; off;) { if (off == RESTART_ENTRY_ALLOCATED) return false; off = le32_to_cpu(*(__le32 *)Add2Ptr(rt, off)); if (off > ts - sizeof(__le32)) return false; }

The existing guards cover three exits: end-of-list (off == 0), the in-use marker (off == RESTART_ENTRY_ALLOCATED), and out-of-bounds (off > ts - sizeof(__le32)). None of the three prevents an in-bounds cycle.

A crafted on-disk RESTART_TABLE whose free chain contains a self-loop or A->B->A cycle whose offsets satisfy:

- in range [sizeof(struct RESTART_TABLE), ts - sizeof(__le32)] - (off - sizeof(struct RESTART_TABLE)) % rsize == 0

passes all existing guards and spins the mount-time thread forever. Reproduced in UML by hand-forging a 2 M…

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CVE-2026-72193 — ntfs3: cap RESTART_TABLE free-chain walker at rt->used