CVE-2025-38059
btrfs: avoid NULL pointer dereference if no valid csum tree
Vexday Risk Score
3Low
SSVC decision (CISA)
Track
No exploitation signal → monitor
CVSS —EPSS 0.2%KEV nãoPoC —Nuclei —Metasploit —Patch —
Lifecycle
18 Jun 2025Published on NVD
Recommendation: Monitor — no exploitation signal at the moment.
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
btrfs: avoid NULL pointer dereference if no valid csum tree
[BUG]
When trying read-only scrub on a btrfs with rescue=idatacsums mount
option, it will crash with the following call trace:
BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000208
#PF: supervisor read access in kernel mode
#PF: error_code(0x0000) - not-present page
CPU: 1 UID: 0 PID: 835 Comm: btrfs Tainted: G O 6.15.0-rc3-custom+ #236 PREEMPT(full)
Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009), BIOS unknown 02/02/2022
RIP: 0010:btrfs_lookup_csums_bitmap+0x49/0x480 [btrfs]
Call Trace:
<TASK>
scrub_find_fill_first_stripe+0x35b/0x3d0 [btrfs]
scrub_simple_mirror+0x175/0x290 [btrfs]
scrub_stripe+0x5f7/0x6f0 [btrfs]
scrub_chunk+0x9a/0x150 [btrfs]
scrub_enumerate_chunks+0x333/0x660 [btrfs]
btrfs_scrub_dev+0x23e/0x600 [btrfs]
btrfs_ioctl+0x1dcf/0x2f80 [btrfs]
__x64_sys_ioctl+0x97/0xc0
do_syscall_64+0x4f/0x120
entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x76/0x7e
[CAUSE]
Mount option "rescue=idatacsums" will completely skip loading the csum
tree, so that any data read will not find any data csum thus we will
ignore data checksum verification.
Normally call sites utilizing csum tree will check the fs state flag
NO_DATA_CSUMS bit, but unfortunately scrub does not check that bit at all.
This results in scrub to call btrfs_search_slot() on a NULL pointer
and triggered above crash.
[FIX]
Check both extent and csum tree root before doing any tree search.
Affected products
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