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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2022-49913 json

btrfs: fix inode list leak during backref walking at find_parent_nodes()

published 2025-05-01 18 mo ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2025-12854

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 10%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

btrfs: fix inode list leak during backref walking at find_parent_nodes()

During backref walking, at find_parent_nodes(), if we are dealing with a data extent and we get an error while resolving the indirect backrefs, at resolve_indirect_refs(), or in the while loop that iterates over the refs in the direct refs rbtree, we end up leaking the inode lists attached to the direct refs we have in the direct refs rbtree that were not yet added to the refs ulist passed as argument to find_parent_nodes(). Since they were not yet added to the refs ulist and prelim_release() does not free the lists, on error the caller can only free the lists attached to the refs that were added to the refs ulist, all the remaining refs get their inode lists never freed, therefore leaking their memory.

Fix this by having prelim_release() always free any attached inode list to each ref found in the rbtree, and have find_parent_nodes() set the ref's inode list to NULL once it transfers ownership of the inode list to a ref added to the refs ulist passed to find_parent_nodes().

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 5.4.224, 5.10.154, 5.15.78, 6.0.8, 6.1
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 6.0.8-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2022-49913

  • linux Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-139.156
  • linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-60.66
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1096.104
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1030.34
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1100.109
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1029.36
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1027.32
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1044.49

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2022-49913

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 4.12.14-122.261.1
  • kernel-source SLES LTSS Extended Security 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5-LTSS 4.12.14-122.261.1
  • kernel-default SLES LTSS Extended Security 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5-LTSS, SLE Live Patching 12 SP5 4.12.14-122.261.1
  • kgraft-patch-SLE12-SP5_Update_69 SLE Live Patching 12 SP5 1-8.3.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2025:01983-1

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-2022-49913 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: btrfs: fix inode list leak during backref walking at find_parent_nodes()

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more 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

Exploit prediction

0.20% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 10% 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
  • CWE-401 Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime
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.