CVE-2022-50020: 
Linux Kernel vulnerability analysis and mitigation

CVE-2022-50020 affects the Linux kernel's ext4 filesystem implementation. The vulnerability was discovered and disclosed on June 18, 2025. The issue involves attempting to resize the filesystem to an unaligned cluster boundary, which can lead to filesystem corruption (NVD, Wiz).

The vulnerability occurs during filesystem resize operations when the target size is not properly aligned with cluster boundaries. When an online resize is attempted with a size that is not an integral multiple of the cluster size, it causes the final resize iteration to attempt growing the filesystem by a negative value. This triggers a BUG_ON condition in the kernel code and results in corruption of the filesystem's in-memory superblock structure (Wiz).

When exploited, this vulnerability leads to filesystem corruption through a corrupted in-memory superblock. The issue affects the stability and integrity of the ext4 filesystem, potentially causing system crashes and data integrity issues (Wiz).

A patch has been developed to avoid attempting to resize the filesystem to an unaligned cluster boundary. The fix prevents the filesystem from being resized to sizes that are not integral multiples of the cluster size (Wiz).