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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2026-45892 json

ext4: drop extent cache after doing PARTIAL_VALID1 zeroout

published 2026-05-27 5 mo ago modified 2026-11-06 2 d ago also EUVD-2026-32358

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 5%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

ext4: drop extent cache after doing PARTIAL_VALID1 zeroout

When splitting an unwritten extent in the middle and converting it to initialized in ext4_split_extent() with the EXT4_EXT_MAY_ZEROOUT and EXT4_EXT_DATA_VALID2 flags set, it could leave a stale unwritten extent.

Assume we have an unwritten file and buffered write in the middle of it without dioread_nolock enabled, it will allocate blocks as written extent.

0 A B N [UUUUUUUUUUUU] on-disk extent U: unwritten extent [UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree [--DDDDDDDD--] D: valid data |<- ->| ----> this range needs to be initialized

ext4_split_extent() first try to split this extent at B with EXT4_EXT_DATA_PARTIAL_VALID1 and EXT4_EXT_MAY_ZEROOUT flag set, but ext4_split_extent_at() failed to split this extent due to temporary lack of space. It zeroout B to N and leave the entire extent as unwritten.

0 A B N [UUUUUUUUUUUU] on-disk extent [UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree [--DDDDDDDDZZ] Z: zeroed data

ext4_split_extent() then try to split this extent at A with EXT4_EXT_DATA_VALID2 flag set. This time, it split successfully and leave an written extent from A to N.

0 A B N [UUWWWWWWWWWW] on-disk extent W: written extent [UUUUUUUUUUUU] extent status tree [--DDDDDDDDZZ]

Finally ext4_map_create_blocks() only insert extent A to B to the extent status tree, and leave an stale unwritten extent in the status tree.

0 A B N [UUWWWWWWWWWW] on-disk extent W: written extent [UUWWWWWWWWUU] extent status tree [--DDDDDDDDZZ]

Fix this issue by always cached extent status entry after zeroing out the second part.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.1.168
  • linux Debian 13 6.12.85-1
  • linux Debian 14 6.18.14-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-45892

  • kernel Azure Linux 3.0 6.6.139.1-1

azure linux advisories AZL-88581

Azure Linux vulnerability data, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, from https://github.com/microsoft/AzureLinuxVulnerabilityData via OSV, under the MIT licence; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. MIT

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-2026-45892 updated cvss 7.0

kernel: ext4: drop extent cache after doing PARTIAL_VALID1 zeroout

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • 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 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    affected: no fix available

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
2 d ago

Exploit prediction

0.16% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 5% 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

Technology feeds

References

Sources

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