Overview

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

fuse: check for NULL root inode in fuse_fill_super_submount

fuse_iget() can return NULL when its inode allocation fails, but fuse_fill_super_submount() passed the result straight to get_fuse_inode() and decremented fi->nlookup without checking it:

    root = fuse_iget(sb, parent_fi->nodeid, ...);
    fi = get_fuse_inode(root);
    fi->nlookup--;

Inside fuse_iget() the inode allocation can fail and return NULL. The submount root takes the iget5_locked() path, whose alloc_inode() can fail under memory pressure (the auto-submount branch can fail the same way in new_inode() or fuse_alloc_submount_lookup()):

    inode = iget5_locked(sb, nodeid, fuse_inode_eq, fuse_inode_set,
                         &nodeid);
    if (!inode)
            return NULL;

A NULL root makes get_fuse_inode() a container_of() on NULL and the nlookup decrement a write to a bogus address, oopsing the mount. With CONFIG_KASAN the following null pointer dereference is reported when the root inode allocation of an auto-submount fails (e.g. under memory pressure):

================================================================== BUG: KASAN: null-ptr-deref in fuse_get_tree_submount+0x656/0x8b0 Read of size 8 at addr 00000000000002b0 by task ls/942 CPU: 0 PID: 942 Comm: ls Tainted: G W 6.6 #15 Call Trace: <TASK> fuse_get_tree_submount+0x656/0x8b0 vfs_get_tree+0x48/0x140 fc_mount+0x13/0x50 fuse_dentry_automount+0x7a/0xb0 __traverse_mounts+0xca/0x330 step_into+0x339/0xac0 path_lookupat+0xc5/0x2f0 filename_lookup+0x163/0x2a0 vfs_statx+0xd5/0x200 do_statx+0x83/0xd0 __x64_sys_statx+0xa0/0xc0 do_syscall_64+0x37/0x90 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x78/0xe2 </TASK>

Return -ENOMEM instead; the caller tears down the partially built superblock on error, matching the other error returns in this function.

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.