CVE-2025-21737

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):
        [<ffffffffaa68fb49>] __kmalloc_noprof+0x359/0x510
        [<ffffffffc32bf1df>] ceph_mds_check_access+0x5bf/0x14e0 [ceph]
        [<ffffffffc3235722>] ceph_open+0x312/0xd80 [ceph]
        [<ffffffffaa7dd786>] do_dentry_open+0x456/0x1120
        [<ffffffffaa7e3729>] vfs_open+0x79/0x360
        [<ffffffffaa832875>] path_openat+0x1de5/0x4390
        [<ffffffffaa834fcc>] do_filp_open+0x19c/0x3c0
        [<ffffffffaa7e44a1>] do_sys_openat2+0x141/0x180
        [<ffffffffaa7e4945>] __x64_sys_open+0xe5/0x1a0
        [<ffffffffac2cc2f7>] do_syscall_64+0xb7/0x210
        [<ffffffffac400130>] 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=<hidden>,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 ]
ProviderTypeBase ScoreAtk. VectorAtk. ComplexityPriv. RequiredVector
NISTNIST
5.5 MEDIUM
LOCAL
LOW
LOW
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
LinuxCNA
---
---
Base Score
CVSS 3.x
EPSS Score
Percentile: 2%
VendorProductVersion
linuxlinux_kernel
6.10 ≤
𝑥
< 6.12.14
linuxlinux_kernel
6.13 ≤
𝑥
< 6.13.3
𝑥
= Vulnerable software versions
Debian logo
Debian Releases
Debian Product
Codename
linux
bullseye
5.10.223-1
not-affected
bookworm
6.1.129-1
not-affected
bullseye (security)
5.10.234-1
fixed
bookworm (security)
6.1.128-1
fixed
trixie
6.12.20-1
fixed
sid
6.12.21-1
fixed