Vulnerability in Linux

CVE-2025-22072

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: spufs: fix gang directory lifetimes prior to "[POWERPC] spufs: Fix gang destroy leaks" we used to have a problem with gang lifetimes - creation of a gang returns opened gang directory, which normally gets removed when that gets closed, but if somebody has created a context belonging to that gang and kept it alive until the gang got closed, removal failed and we ended up with a leak. Unfortunately, it had been fixed the wrong way. Dentry of gang directory was no longer pinned, and rmdir on close was gone. One problem was that failure of open kept calling simple_rmdir() as cleanup, which meant an unbalanced dput(). Another bug was in the success case - gang creation incremented link count on root directory, but that was no longer undone when gang got destroyed. Fix consists of * reverting the commit in question * adding a counter to gang, protected by ->i_rwsem of gang directory inode. * having it set to 1 at creation time, dropped in both spufs_dir_close() and spufs_gang_close() and bumped in spufs_create_context(), provided that it's not 0. * using simple_recursive_removal() to take the gang directory out when counter reaches zero.

EPSS: 0.002 (10.1th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.8 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H.

Affected products

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2025-22072?
CVE-2025-22072 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 7.8/10. Published 2025-04-16.
How severe is CVE-2025-22072?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.8 out of 10.
Is CVE-2025-22072 known to be exploited?
1 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.