CVE-2023-53777
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
erofs: kill hooked chains to avoid loops on deduplicated compressed images
After heavily stressing EROFS with several images which include a hand-crafted image of repeated patterns for more than 46 days, I found two chains could be linked with each other almost simultaneously and form a loop so that the entire loop won't be submitted. As a consequence, the corresponding file pages will remain locked forever.
It can be _only_ observed on data-deduplicated compressed images. For example, consider two chains with five pclusters in total: Chain 1: 2->3->4->5 -- The tail pcluster is 5; Chain 2: 5->1->2 -- The tail pcluster is 2.
Chain 2 could link to Chain 1 with pcluster 5; and Chain 1 could link to Chain 2 at the same time with pcluster 2.
Since hooked chains are all linked locklessly now, I have no idea how to simply avoid the race. Instead, let's avoid hooked chains completely until I could work out a proper way to fix this and end users finally tell us that it's needed to add it back.
Actually, this optimization can be found with multi-threaded workloads (especially even more often on deduplicated compressed images), yet I'm not sure about the overall system impacts of not having this compared with implementation complexity.
AI Insight
LLM-synthesized narrative grounded in this CVE's description and references.
A race condition in EROFS' handling of deduplicated compressed images can cause a circular chain, locking file pages forever.
Vulnerability
CVE-2023-53777 is a race condition in the Linux kernel's EROFS filesystem. When processing deduplicated compressed images, EROFS uses 'hooked chains' to link pclusters. Under heavy multi-threaded workloads, two chains can link to each other almost simultaneously, forming a loop. This prevents the loop from being submitted for I/O, leaving the corresponding file pages locked indefinitely.
Exploitation
An attacker must provide a specially crafted data-deduplicated compressed image. The race is more likely to manifest with multi-threaded workloads. No special privileges are required beyond mounting the malicious image; the condition occurs during normal page cache operations.
Impact
Successful exploitation results in a denial of service (DoS): affected processes hang trying to access the locked pages, potentially leading to system unresponsiveness or reboot.
Mitigation
The fix removes the hooked chains optimization entirely until a proper solution is developed. Patches have been committed to the stable kernel trees (see [1] and [2]). Users should update their kernels to incorporate these commits.
AI Insight generated on May 19, 2026. Synthesized from this CVE's description and the cited reference URLs; citations are validated against the source bundle.
Affected products
2Patches
4d3b39ea24835b5b0d52f00e410c2b98a40d9967c28b23f6cVulnerability mechanics
Generated on May 9, 2026. Inputs: CWE entries + fix-commit diffs from this CVE's patches. Citations validated against bundle.
References
4News mentions
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