CVE-2026-112935: filelock: SoftFileLock stale-lock break removes a live lock file on a reused inode number and admits two holders

The stale-lock break shared by SoftFileLock, MarkerSoftFileLock and SoftFileLease (and their async variants, and a FileLock that has fallen back to a soft lock on ENOSYS, the “not implemented” error) recognises the marker it judged stale by two values. The marker is the lock file at <path>, whose presence says a process holds the lock. The values are its inode number (the kernel’s identity for a file, independent of its name) and its modification time (mtime) not being newer. The check runs after the contender has already closed the marker, so nothing keeps the inode allocated.

On a filesystem that hands a freed inode number straight to the next file (ext4, xfs, overlayfs on them) the next holder’s marker can carry that number. A contender still between its read and its break then renames and unlinks the live marker. Another local user (the other user below) who can create files in the lock’s directory, a sticky /tmp included (the sticky bit is a directory flag that lets only a file’s owner remove it), forces this at will. It plants a marker with a stale owner record and a modification time in the future and unlinks it as soon as a contender has read it. Two processes of the user running the lock (the lock user below) then hold the same default-configured lock at once, and nothing raises or logs. Affected versions: filelock >= 3.22.0 and <= 4.2.0 (finding ANT-2026-KIIS96IX).