CVE-2023-54121 btrfs: fix incorrect splitting in btrfs_drop_extent_map_range

What is CVE-2023-54121?

CVE-2023-54121 is a high-severity memory corruption vulnerability in Linux, published on 24 Dec 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 incorrect splitting in btrfs_drop_extent_map_range

In production we were seeing a variety of WARN_ON()'s in the extent_map code, specifically in btrfs_drop_extent_map_range() when we have to call add_extent_mapping() for our second split.

Consider the following extent map layout

PINNED [0 16K) [32K, 48K)

and then we call btrfs_drop_extent_map_range for [0, 36K), with skip_pinned == true. The initial loop will have

start = 0 end = 36K len = 36K

we will find the [0, 16k) extent, but since we are pinned we will skip it, which has this code

start = em_end; if (end != (u64)-1) len = start + len - em_end;

em_end here is 16K, so now the values are

start = 16K len = 16K + 36K - 16K = 36K

len should instead be 20K. This is a problem when we find the next extent at [32K, 48K), we need to split this extent to leave [36K, 48k), however the code for the split looks like this

split->start = start + len; split->len = em_end - (start + len);

In this case we have

em_end = 48K split->start = 16K + 36K // this should be 16K + 20K split->len = 48K - (16K + 36K) // this overflows as 16K + 36K is 52K

and now we have an invalid extent_map in the tree that potentially overlaps other entries in the extent map. Even in the non-overlapping case we will have split->start set improperly, which will cause problems with any block related calculations.

We don't actually need len in this loop, we can simply use end as our end point, and only adjust start up when we find a pinned extent we need to skip.

Adjust the logic to do this, which keeps us from inserting an invalid extent map.

We only skip_pinned in the relocation case, so this is relatively rare, except in the case where you are running relocation a lot, which can happen with auto relocation on.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-54121?

How do I fix CVE-2023-54121?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade to the fixed version. Memory-safe languages, compiler hardening and fuzzing prevent most new cases. More about Memory corruption.

Is CVE-2023-54121 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-54121 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

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

Also known as BELL-CVE-2023-54121, DEBIAN-CVE-2023-54121, GHSA-8482-4rvj-5h62, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-11-CVE-2023-54121, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2204-CVE-2023-54121, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-54121.