CVE-2024-53685 ceph: give up on paths longer than PATH_MAX

What is CVE-2024-53685?

CVE-2024-53685 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 11 Jan 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:

ceph: give up on paths longer than PATH_MAX

If the full path to be built by ceph_mdsc_build_path() happens to be longer than PATH_MAX, then this function will enter an endless (retry) loop, effectively blocking the whole task. Most of the machine becomes unusable, making this a very simple and effective DoS vulnerability.

I cannot imagine why this retry was ever implemented, but it seems rather useless and harmful to me. Let's remove it and fail with ENAMETOOLONG instead.

Weakness: CWE-835

Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-53685?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2024-53685?

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-2024-53685 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-53685 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 BELL-CVE-2024-53685, DEBIAN-CVE-2024-53685, GHSA-32jq-w4j4-wjvc, UBUNTU-CVE-2024-53685.