CVE-2022-49913 btrfs: fix inode list leak during backref walking at find_parent_nodes()

What is CVE-2022-49913?

CVE-2022-49913 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 1 May 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

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().

Weakness: CWE-401

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-49913?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2022-49913?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2022-49913 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-49913 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

• CVE-2026-53266 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2013-6282 Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2022-0185 Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2013-2094 Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Exploited High 7.8

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2022-49913, GHSA-6j92-j58g-fc8v, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-49913.