Vulnerability in Linux
CVE-2025-21643
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: netfs: Fix kernel async DIO Netfslib needs to be able to handle kernel-initiated asynchronous DIO that is supplied with a bio_vec[] array. Currently, because of the async flag, this gets passed to netfs_extract_user_iter() which throws a warning and fails because it only handles IOVEC and UBUF iterators. This can be triggered through a combination of cifs and a loopback blockdev with something like: mount //my/cifs/share /foo dd if=/dev/zero of=/foo/m0 bs=4K count=1K losetup --sector-size 4096 --direct-io=on /dev/loop2046 /foo/m0 echo hello >/dev/loop2046 This causes the following to appear in syslog: WARNING: CPU: 2 PID: 109 at fs/netfs/iterator.c:50 netfs_extract_user_iter+0x170/0x250 [netfs] and the write to fail. Fix this by removing the check in netfs_unbuffered_write_iter_locked() that causes async kernel DIO writes to be handled as userspace writes. Note that this change relies on the kernel caller maintaining the existence of the bio_vec array (or kvec[] or folio_queue) until the op is complete.
EPSS: 0.002 (11.3th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.
CVSS v3 metric
CVSS v3 base score 5.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.
Affected products
- Linux — versions 153a9961b551101cd38e94e26cd92fbfd198b19b, 6.8, 0
- Linux Linux_kernel — versions 6.13
Public proof-of-concept exploits
References
Frequently asked questions
- What is CVE-2025-21643?
- CVE-2025-21643 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2025-01-19.
- How severe is CVE-2025-21643?
- Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.
- Is CVE-2025-21643 known to be exploited?
- 2 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.