Vulnerability in Linux

CVE-2025-40306

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: orangefs: fix xattr related buffer overflow... Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> forwarded me a message from Disclosure <disclosure@aisle.com> with the following warning: > The helper `xattr_key()` uses the pointer variable in the loop condition > rather than dereferencing it. As `key` is incremented, it remains non-NULL > (until it runs into unmapped memory), so the loop does not terminate on > valid C strings and will walk memory indefinitely, consuming CPU or hanging > the thread. I easily reproduced this with setfattr and getfattr, causing a kernel oops, hung user processes and corrupted orangefs files. Disclosure sent along a diff (not a patch) with a suggested fix, which I based this patch on. After xattr_key started working right, xfstest generic/069 exposed an xattr related memory leak that lead to OOM. xattr_key returns a hashed key. When adding xattrs to the orangefs xattr cache, orangefs used hash_add, a kernel hashing macro. hash_add also hashes the key using hash_log which resulted in additions to the xattr cache going to the wrong hash bucket. generic/069 tortures a single file and orangefs does a getattr for the xattr "security.capability" every time. Orangefs negative caches on xattrs which includes a kmalloc. Since adds to the xattr cache were going to the wrong bucket, every getattr for "security.capability" resulted in another kmalloc, none of which were ever freed. I changed the two uses of hash_add to hlist_add_head instead and the memory leak ceased and generic/069 quit throwing furniture.

EPSS: 0.002 (9.3th 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

  • Linux — versions f7ab093f74bf638ed98fd1115f3efa17e308bb7f, 4.6, 0

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2025-40306?
CVE-2025-40306 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 7.8/10. Published 2025-12-08.
How severe is CVE-2025-40306?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.8 out of 10.