In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ext4: don't allow journal inode to have encrypt flag Mounting a filesystem whose journal inode has the encrypt flag causes a NULL dereference in fscrypt_limit_io_blocks() when the 'inlinecrypt' mount option is used. The problem is that when jbd2_journal_init_inode() calls bmap(), it eventually finds its way into ext4_iomap_begin(), which calls fscrypt_limit_io_blocks(). fscrypt_limit_io_blocks() requires that if the inode is encrypted, then its encryption key must already be set up. That's not the case here, since the journal inode is never "opened" like a normal file would be. Hence the crash. A reproducer is: mkfs.ext4 -F /dev/vdb debugfs -w /dev/vdb -R "set_inode_field <8> flags 0x80808" mount /dev/vdb /mnt -o inlinecrypt To fix this, make ext4 consider journal inodes with the encrypt flag to be invalid. (Note, maybe other flags should be rejected on the journal inode too. For now, this is just the minimal fix for the above issue.) I've marked this as fixing the commit that introduced the call to fscrypt_limit_io_blocks(), since that's what made an actual crash start being possible. But this fix could be applied to any version of ext4 that supports the encrypt feature.
Conclusion & alert: CVE-2022-50277 is rated Low Risk (22.3/100): CVSS Medium severity, with low exploitation likelihood (EPSS 0.01%). Mandatory action: Monitor for updates and reassess as exploit intelligence or EPSS changes.
Risk is dynamic; we continuously reassess and refresh what is shown on this page as upstream context changes.
EPSS lead: Daily EPSS estimates relative likelihood of exploitation; percentile ranks this CVE among scored vulnerabilities (higher = more severe relative rank).
| # | Date | Old EPSS score | New EPSS score | Delta (New - Old) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2025-09-16 | — | 0.01% | — |
Full EPSS history (1 record total)
CVSS metrics for this CVE.
| Base score | Version | Severity | Vector | Exploitability | Impact | Score source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.5 | 3.1 | MEDIUM |
|
1.8 | 3.6 | [email protected] |
| vendor | priority | summary | link |
|---|---|---|---|
debian
|
unimportant | CVE-2022-50277 unimportant priority: Debian including 1 source packages (linux), 5 status rows across 5 suites (bookworm, bullseye, forky, sid, trixie): resolved 5. | https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2022-50277 |
redhat
|
medium | — | https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2022-50277 |
suse
|
high | — | https://www.suse.com/security/cve/CVE-2022-50277/ |
ubuntu
|
medium | CVE-2022-50277 medium priority: Ubuntu including 150 source packages (linux, linux-allwinner-5.19, …), 1350 status rows across 9 suites (bionic, focal, jammy, noble, plucky, questing, trusty, upstream, xenial): DNE 969, ignored 159, not-affected 142, released 80. | https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2022-50277 |
| Vendor | Product | Version | Raw CPE |
|---|---|---|---|
| linux | linux_kernel | >= 5.18, < 6.0.18 | cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:* |
| linux | linux_kernel | >= 6.1, < 6.1.4 | cpe:2.3:o:linux:linux_kernel:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:* |