CVE-2022-50485 ext4: add EXT4_IGET_BAD flag to prevent unexpected bad inode

What is CVE-2022-50485?

CVE-2022-50485 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 4 Oct 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:

ext4: add EXT4_IGET_BAD flag to prevent unexpected bad inode

There are many places that will get unhappy (and crash) when ext4_iget() returns a bad inode. However, if iget the boot loader inode, allows a bad inode to be returned, because the inode may not be initialized. This mechanism can be used to bypass some checks and cause panic. To solve this problem, we add a special iget flag EXT4_IGET_BAD. Only with this flag we'd be returning bad inode from ext4_iget(), otherwise we always return the error code if the inode is bad inode.(suggested by Jan Kara)

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-50485?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2022-50485?

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-2022-50485 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-50485 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-2022-50485, GHSA-7gg4-pr88-8256, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-50485.