NTFS3 Hardened In Linux 7.4 Against Corrupted Or Maliciously-Crafted NTFS Volumes

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LINUX STORAGE

Paragon Software's Konstantin Komarov sent out the latest NTFS3 driver updates for this in-kernel NTFS read/write driver. With Linux 7.4, the NTFS3 driver is focused on being hardened against corrupted or maliciously-crafted NTFS volumes.

The NTFS3 driver continues seeing fixes for the mainline kernel with this open-source contribution from Paragon Software. This is the existing alternative to the recently-merged modern "NTFS" read/write kernel driver with the "NTFS Resurrection" that took place in Linux 7.1.

NTFS3 will now better cope with NTFS volumes that are corrupted or have been maliciously crafted. A lot of the C driver code has undergone fixes as a result of fuzzing and Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN) reports. Among the fixes are for avoiding a possible 64K leak of the kernel heap to user-space, a damage compressed file returning uninitialized page cache contents to user-space, a heap overflow, mount writing past the MFT record buffer, and other fixes.

WSL3 also adds a new "ugm" mount option that is enabled by default. When mounting an NTFS partition with ugm=0, newly created files don't have the WSL uid/gid/mode extended attributes that Windows doesn't use.

More details on these NTFS3 changes for Linux 7.4 via this pull request.