Vulnerability in Linux

CVE-2025-71161

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: dm-verity: disable recursive forward error correction There are two problems with the recursive correction: 1. It may cause denial-of-service. In fec_read_bufs, there is a loop that has 253 iterations. For each iteration, we may call verity_hash_for_block recursively. There is a limit of 4 nested recursions - that means that there may be at most 253^4 (4 billion) iterations. Red Hat QE team actually created an image that pushes dm-verity to this limit - and this image just makes the udev-worker process get stuck in the 'D' state. 2. It doesn't work. In fec_read_bufs we store data into the variable "fio->bufs", but fio bufs is shared between recursive invocations, if "verity_hash_for_block" invoked correction recursively, it would overwrite partially filled fio->bufs.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.5 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.004 (29.3th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 29th percentile — 29.3% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2025-71161: held from 0.003 to 0.004.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.003 · newest: 0.004 · change: +0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2025-71161?
CVE-2025-71161 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux, classified under Off-by-one Error. CVSS score: 7.5/10. Published 2026-01-23.
How severe is CVE-2025-71161?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.5 out of 10.