CVE-2025-21737

CVE Details

Release Date:	2025-02-27
Impact:	Moderate	What is this?

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ceph: fix memory leak in ceph_mds_auth_match() We now free the temporary target path substring allocation on every possible branch, instead of omitting the default branch. In some cases, a memory leak occured, which could rapidly crash the system (depending on how many file accesses were attempted). This was detected in production because it caused a continuous memory growth, eventually triggering kernel OOM and completely hard-locking the kernel. Relevant kmemleak stacktrace: unreferenced object 0xffff888131e69900 (size 128): comm "git", pid 66104, jiffies 4295435999 hex dump (first 32 bytes): 76 6f 6c 75 6d 65 73 2f 63 6f 6e 74 61 69 6e 65 volumes/containe 72 73 2f 67 69 74 65 61 2f 67 69 74 65 61 2f 67 rs/gitea/gitea/g backtrace (crc 2f3bb450): [] __kmalloc_noprof+0x359/0x510 [] ceph_mds_check_access+0x5bf/0x14e0 [ceph] [] ceph_open+0x312/0xd80 [ceph] [] do_dentry_open+0x456/0x1120 [] vfs_open+0x79/0x360 [] path_openat+0x1de5/0x4390 [] do_filp_open+0x19c/0x3c0 [] do_sys_openat2+0x141/0x180 [] __x64_sys_open+0xe5/0x1a0 [] do_syscall_64+0xb7/0x210 [] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x77/0x7f It can be triggered by mouting a subdirectory of a CephFS filesystem, and then trying to access files on this subdirectory with an auth token using a path-scoped capability: $ ceph auth get client.services [client.services] key = REDACTED caps mds = "allow rw fsname=cephfs path=/volumes/" caps mon = "allow r fsname=cephfs" caps osd = "allow rw tag cephfs data=cephfs" $ cat /proc/self/mounts services@[REDACTED].cephfs=/volumes/containers /ceph/containers ceph rw,noatime,name=services,secret=,ms_mode=prefer-crc,mount_timeout=300,acl,mon_addr=[REDACTED]:3300,recover_session=clean 0 0 $ seq 1 1000000 | xargs -P32 --replace={} touch /ceph/containers/file-{} && \ seq 1 1000000 | xargs -P32 --replace={} cat /ceph/containers/file-{} [ idryomov: combine if statements, rename rc to path_matched and make it a bool, formatting ]

See more information about CVE-2025-21737 from MITRE CVE dictionary and NIST NVD

NOTE: The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.

CVSS v3 metrics

Base Score:	5.5
Vector String:	CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Version:	3.1
Attack Vector:	Local
Attack Complexity:	Low
Privileges Required:	Low
User Interaction:	None
Scope:	Unchanged
Confidentiality Impact:	None
Integrity Impact:	None
Availability Impact:	High

Errata information

Platform	Errata	Release Date
Oracle Linux version 10 (kernel-uek)	ELSA-2025-20480	2025-07-17
Oracle Linux version 9 (kernel-uek)	ELSA-2025-20480	2025-07-17