Synced 30 Sept 2026 23:45 UTC Account
← All products

CVE-2025-21864

HIGH severity · CVSS 7.8 · CWE-476
7.8CVSS HIGH

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: tcp: drop secpath at the same time as we currently drop dst Xiumei reported hitting the WARN in xfrm6_tunnel_net_exit while running tests that boil down to: - create a pair of netns - run a basic TCP test over ipcomp6 - delete the pair of netns The xfrm_state found on spi_byaddr was not deleted at the time we delete the netns, because we still have a reference on it. This lingering reference comes from a secpath (which holds a ref on the xfrm_state), which is still attached to an skb. This skb is not leaked, it ends up on sk_receive_queue and then gets defer-free'd by skb_attempt_defer_free. The problem happens when we defer freeing an skb (push it on one CPU's defer_list), and don't flush that list before the netns is deleted. In that case, we still have a reference on the xfrm_state that we don't expect at this point. We already drop the skb's dst in the TCP receive path when it's no longer needed, so let's also drop the secpath. At this point, tcp_filter has already called into the LSM hooks that may require the secpath, so it should not be needed anymore. However, in some of those places, the MPTCP extension has just been attached to the skb, so we cannot simply drop all extensions.

Impact & exploitability

Attack vectorLocal
Attack complexityLow
Privileges requiredLow
User interactionNone
Confidentiality impactHigh
Integrity impactHigh
Availability impactHigh
Exploit probability (EPSS)0%

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected products we track (1)

Linux Kernel

Recommendation

Apply the vendor fix promptly. Open any affected product above for its exact safe version.

Official patch: https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/69cafd9413084cd5012cf5d7c7ec6f3d493726d9 ↗

Additional information