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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2022-49171 json

ext4: don't BUG if someone dirty pages without asking ext4 first

published 2025-02-26 20 mo ago modified 2026-11-05 3 d ago also EUVD-2022-55054

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 20%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

ext4: don't BUG if someone dirty pages without asking ext4 first

[un]pin_user_pages_remote is dirtying pages without properly warning the file system in advance. A related race was noted by Jan Kara in 2018[1]; however, more recently instead of it being a very hard-to-hit race, it could be reliably triggered by process_vm_writev(2) which was discovered by Syzbot[2].

This is technically a bug in mm/gup.c, but arguably ext4 is fragile in that if some other kernel subsystem dirty pages without properly notifying the file system using page_mkwrite(), ext4 will BUG, while other file systems will not BUG (although data will still be lost).

So instead of crashing with a BUG, issue a warning (since there may be potential data loss) and just mark the page as clean to avoid unprivileged denial of service attacks until the problem can be properly fixed. More discussion and background can be found in the thread starting at [2].

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20180103100430.GE4911@quack2.suse.cz [2] https://lore.kernel.org/r/Yg0m6IjcNmfaSokM@google.com

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 4.9.311, 4.14.276, 4.19.238, 5.4.189, 5.10.110, 5.15.33, 5.16.19, 5.17.2, 5.18
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 5.17.3-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2022-49171

  • linux Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 4.15.0-189.200
  • linux Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-117.132
  • linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-37.39
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 4.15.0-1137.148
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1078.84
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1011.14
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1078.84
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1008.12

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2022-49171

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • kernel-syms SLES LTSS Extended Security 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5-LTSS 4.12.14-122.258.1
  • kernel-source SLES LTSS Extended Security 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5-LTSS 4.12.14-122.258.1
  • kernel-default SLES LTSS Extended Security 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5-LTSS, SLE Live Patching 12 SP5 4.12.14-122.258.1
  • kgraft-patch-SLE12-SP5_Update_68 SLE Live Patching 12 SP5 1-8.3.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2025:01600-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2022-49171 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: ext4: don't BUG if someone dirty pages without asking ext4 first

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more
    affected: no fix available
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
3 d ago

Exploit prediction

0.28% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 20% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Weakness
Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.