CVE-2025-68788

CVE Details

Release Date:	2026-01-13
Impact:	Moderate	What is this?

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: fsnotify: do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events on child for special files inotify/fanotify do not allow users with no read access to a file to subscribe to events (e.g. IN_ACCESS/IN_MODIFY), but they do allow the same user to subscribe for watching events on children when the user has access to the parent directory (e.g. /dev). Users with no read access to a file but with read access to its parent directory can still stat the file and see if it was accessed/modified via atime/mtime change. The same is not true for special files (e.g. /dev/null). Users will not generally observe atime/mtime changes when other users read/write to special files, only when someone sets atime/mtime via utimensat(). Align fsnotify events with this stat behavior and do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events to parent watchers on read/write of special files. The events are still generated to parent watchers on utimensat(). This closes some side-channels that could be possibly used for information exfiltration [1]. [1] https://snee.la/pdf/pubs/file-notification-attacks.pdf

See more information about CVE-2025-68788 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:	2.5
Vector String:	CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
Version:	3.1
Attack Vector:	Local
Attack Complexity:	High
Privileges Required:	Low
User Interaction:	None
Scope:	Unchanged
Confidentiality Impact:	Low
Integrity Impact:	None
Availability Impact:	None

Errata information

Platform	Errata	Release Date
Oracle Linux version 10 (kernel-uek)	ELSA-2026-50112	2026-02-20
Oracle Linux version 9 (kernel-uek)	ELSA-2026-50112	2026-02-20