CVE-2023-52699: Debian Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 5.3. EPSS: 1% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: sysv: don't call sb_bread() with pointers_lock held syzbot is reporting sleep in atomic context in SysV filesystem [1], for sb_bread() is called with rw_spinlock held. A "write_lock(&pointers_lock) => read_lock(&pointers_lock) deadlock" bug and a "sb_bread() with write_lock(&pointers_lock)" bug were introduced by "Replace BKL for chain locking with sysvfs-private rwlock" in Linux 2.5.12. Then, "[PATCH] err1-40: sysvfs locking fix" in Linux 2.6.8 fixed the former bug by moving pointers_lock lock to the callers, but instead introduced a "sb_bread() with read_lock(&pointers_lock)" bug (which made this problem easier to hit). Al Viro suggested that why not to do like get_branch()/get_block()/ find_shared() in Minix filesystem does. And doing like that is almost a revert of "[PATCH] err1-40: sysvfs locking fix" except that get_branch() from with find_shared() is called without write_lock(&pointers_lock).

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 10.0 only
• Linux Linux Kernel: before 4.19.312 (fixed in 4.19.312); from 4.20, before 5.4.274 (fixed in 5.4.274); from 5.5, before 5.10.215 (fixed in 5.10.215); from 5.11, before 5.15.155 (fixed in 5.15.155); from 5.16, before 6.1.86 (fixed in 6.1.86); from 6.2, before 6.6.27 (fixed in 6.6.27); …

Published 2024-05-19. Last modified 2026-06-17.