Findings

CVE-2026-43361

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: btrfs: fix transaction abort when snapshotting received subvolumes Currently a user can trigger a t…

Published May 8, 2026 · corrected/updated Jun 17, 2026 · linux linux kernel · evidence confidence medium

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: btrfs: fix transaction abort when snapshotting received subvolumes Currently a user can trigger a transaction abort by snapshotting a previously received snapshot a bunch of times until we reach a BTRFS_UUID_KEY_RECEIVED_SUBVOL item overflow (the maximum item size we can store in a leaf). This is very likely not common in practice, but if it happens, it turns the filesystem into RO mode. The snapshot, send and set_received_subvol and subvol_setflags (used by receive) don't require CAP_SYS_ADMIN, just inode_owner_or_capable(). A malicious user could use this to turn a filesystem into RO mode and disrupt a system. Reproducer script: $ cat test.sh #!/bin/bash DEV=/dev/sdi MNT=/mnt/sdi # Use smallest node size to make the test faster. mkfs.btrfs -f --nodesize 4K $DEV mount $DEV $MNT # Create a subvolume and set it to RO so that it can be used for send. btrfs subvolume create $MNT/sv touch $MNT/sv/foo btrfs property set $MNT/sv ro true # Send and receive the subvolume into snaps/sv. mkdir $MNT/snaps btrfs send $MNT/sv | btrfs receive $MNT/snaps # Now snapshot the received subvolume, which has a received_uuid, a # lot of times to trigger the leaf overflow. total=500 for ((i = 1; i /dev/null done echo umount $MNT When running the test: $ ./test.sh (...) Create subvolume '/mnt/sdi/sv' At subvol /mnt/sdi/sv At subvol sv Creating snapshot 496/500ERROR: Could not create subvolume: Value too large for defined data type Creating snapshot 497/500ERROR: Could not create subvolume: Read-only file system Creating snapshot 498/500ERROR: Could not create subvolume: Read-only file system Creating snapshot 499/500ERROR: Could not create subvolume: Read-only file system Creating snapshot 500/500ERROR: Could not create subvolume: Read-only file system And in dmesg/syslog: $ dmesg (...) [251067.627338] BTRFS warning (device sdi): insert uuid item failed -75 (0x4628b21c4ac8d898, 0x2598bee2b1515c91) type 252! [251067.629212]