Linux 7.4 Hardens NTFS3 Against Booby-Trapped NTFS Drives

Paragon Software’s NTFS3 updates for Linux 7.4 are all about surviving corrupted or maliciously crafted NTFS volumes.

What’s fixed

• Lots of fixes from fuzzing and KASAN reports.
• A possible 64K kernel heap leak to user space, a damaged compressed file returning uninitialized page cache, a heap overflow, and mount writing past the MFT record buffer.
• A new ugm mount option, on by default. With ugm=0, new files skip the WSL uid/gid/mode extended attributes Windows doesn’t use.

My take

A file system driver is attack surface every time you plug in a drive. Good to see this hardened, especially with the newer NTFS driver from Linux 7.1 sitting next to it. I wrote up a quick how-to on mounting strange drives safely too.

God Bless, and Use the Source!

References & Further Reading

• NTFS3 Hardened In Linux 7.4 (Phoronix)