CVE-2023-53618: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: btrfs: reject invalid reloc tree root keys with stack dump [BUG] Syzbot reported a crash that an ASSERT() got triggered inside prepare_to_merge(). That ASSERT() makes sure the reloc tree is properly pointed back by its subvolume tree. [CAUSE] After more debugging output, it turns out we had an invalid reloc tree: BTRFS error (device loop1): reloc tree mismatch, root 8 has no reloc root, expect reloc root key (-8, 132, 8) gen 17 Note the above root key is (TREE_RELOC_OBJECTID, ROOT_ITEM, QUOTA_TREE_OBJECTID), meaning it's a reloc tree for quota tree. But reloc trees can only exist for subvolumes, as for non-subvolume trees, we just COW the involved tree block, no need to create a reloc tree since those tree blocks won't be shared with other trees. Only subvolumes tree can share tree blocks with other trees (thus they have BTRFS_ROOT_SHAREABLE flag). Thus this new debug output proves my previous assumption that corrupted on-disk data can trigger that ASSERT(). [FIX] Besides the dedicated fix and the graceful exit, also let tree-checker to check such root keys, to make sure reloc trees can only exist for subvolumes.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 5.2.19, before 5.3 (fixed in 5.3); from 5.3.4, before 5.15.127 (fixed in 5.15.127); from 5.16, before 6.1.46 (fixed in 6.1.46); from 6.2, before 6.4.11 (fixed in 6.4.11); version 6.5 only

Published 2025-10-07. Last modified 2026-06-17.