CVE-2026-72193

Technical Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ntfs3: cap RESTART_TABLE free-chain walker at rt->used

A crafted NTFS3 disk image triggers an in-kernel infinite loop at

mount time, hanging the mounting thread and firing the soft-lockup

watchdog within ~22s on multi-CPU hosts (panic with

kernel.softlockup_panic=1). The bug is reachable from desktop USB

auto-mount on distributions where udisks2 routes the NTFS signature

to the in-tree ntfs3 driver (Arch family and an increasing fraction

of Fedora / openSUSE / RHEL deployments); CAP_SYS_ADMIN-class manual

mount elsewhere.

check_rstbl()'s second walker iterates the free-entry singly-linked

list headed by rt->first_free with no upper bound on iteration count:

for (off = ff; off;) {

if (off == RESTART_ENTRY_ALLOCATED)

return false;

off = le32_to_cpu(*(__le32 *)Add2Ptr(rt, off));

if (off > ts - sizeof(__le32))

return false;

}

The existing guards cover three exits: end-of-list

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories, patches, and mitigation guidance. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

References