CVE-2021-46989

Medium

Elevated severity or exploit probability.

CVSS base

7.1 HIGH

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H

EPSS — probability of exploitation (30 days)

0.2%

15.5th percentile

CISA KEV

Not listed

Weakness / dates

—

Published 2024-02-28 · modified 2026-08-04

CVSS breakdown

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H

Attack Vector	L	Local
Attack Complexity	L	Low
Privileges Required	L	Low
User Interaction	N	None
Scope	U	Unchanged
Confidentiality	N	None
Integrity	H	High
Availability	H	High

Timeline

2024-02-28 — Published (NVD)
2026-08-04 — Last modified (NVD)

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: hfsplus: prevent corruption in shrinking truncate I believe there are some issues introduced by commit 31651c607151 ("hfsplus: avoid deadlock on file truncation") HFS+ has extent records which always contains 8 extents. In case the first extent record in catalog file gets full, new ones are allocated from extents overflow file. In case shrinking truncate happens to middle of an extent record which locates in extents overflow file, the logic in hfsplus_file_truncate() was changed so that call to hfs_brec_remove() is not guarded any more. Right action would be just freeing the extents that exceed the new size inside extent record by calling hfsplus_free_extents(), and then check if the whole extent record should be removed. However since the guard (blk_cnt > start) is now after the call to hfs_brec_remove(), this has unfortunate effect that the last matching extent record is removed unconditionally. To reproduce this issue, create a file which has at least 10 extents, and then perform shrinking truncate into middle of the last extent record, so that the number of remaining extents is not under or divisible by 8. This causes the last extent record (8 extents) to be removed totally instead of truncating into middle of it. Thus this causes corruption, and lost data. Fix for this is simply checking if the new truncated end is below the start of this extent record, making it safe to remove the full extent record. However call to hfs_brec_remove() can't be moved to it's previous place since we're dropping ->tree_lock and it can cause a race condition and the cached info being invalidated possibly corrupting the node data. Another issue is related to this one. When entering into the block (blk_cnt > start) we are not holding the ->tree_lock. We break out from the loop not holding the lock, but hfs_find_exit() does unlock it. Not sure if it's possible for someone else to take the lock under our feet, but it can cause hard to debug errors and premature unlocking. Even if there's no real risk of it, the locking should still always be kept in balance. Thus taking the lock now just before the check.

Affected

linux

References

Official: NVD · CVE.org