dm-verity: disable recursive forward error correction
authorMikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Fri, 14 Nov 2025 15:54:01 +0000 (16:54 +0100)
committerMikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Wed, 10 Dec 2025 18:27:59 +0000 (19:27 +0100)
commitd9f3e47d3fae0c101d9094bc956ed24e7a0ee801
treea9982b1dfc4d624ab3d95f85eace50964f8329a7
parent7fa3e7d114abc9cc71cc35d768e116641074ddb4
dm-verity: disable recursive forward error correction

There are two problems with the recursive correction:

1. It may cause denial-of-service. In fec_read_bufs, there is a loop that
has 253 iterations. For each iteration, we may call verity_hash_for_block
recursively. There is a limit of 4 nested recursions - that means that
there may be at most 253^4 (4 billion) iterations. Red Hat QE team
actually created an image that pushes dm-verity to this limit - and this
image just makes the udev-worker process get stuck in the 'D' state.

2. It doesn't work. In fec_read_bufs we store data into the variable
"fio->bufs", but fio bufs is shared between recursive invocations, if
"verity_hash_for_block" invoked correction recursively, it would
overwrite partially filled fio->bufs.

Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Reported-by: Guangwu Zhang <guazhang@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Sami Tolvanen <samitolvanen@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@kernel.org>
drivers/md/dm-verity-fec.c
drivers/md/dm-verity-fec.h
drivers/md/dm-verity-target.c