CVE-2026-23252 xfs: get rid of the xchk_xfile_*_descr calls

What is CVE-2026-23252?

CVE-2026-23252 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 18 Mar 2026. 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:

xfs: get rid of the xchk_xfile_*_descr calls

The xchk_xfile_*_descr macros call kasprintf, which can fail to allocate memory if the formatted string is larger than 16 bytes (or whatever the nofail guarantees are nowadays). Some of them could easily exceed that, and Jiaming Zhang found a few places where that can happen with syzbot.

The descriptions are debugging aids and aren't required to be unique, so let's just pass in static strings and eliminate this path to failure. Note this patch touches a number of commits, most of which were merged between 6.6 and 6.14.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-23252?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2026-23252?

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-2026-23252 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-23252 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-2026-23252, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-23252, GHSA-m267-vw57-h3jp, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-13-CVE-2026-23252, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-23252.