CVE-2025-21632: x86/fpu: Ensure shadow stack is active before "getting" registers
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
x86/fpu: Ensure shadow stack is active before "getting" registers
The x86 shadow stack support has its own set of registers. Those registers
are XSAVE-managed, but they are "supervisor state components" which means
that userspace can not touch them with XSAVE/XRSTOR. It also means that
they are not accessible from the existing ptrace ABI for XSAVE state.
Thus, there is a new ptrace get/set interface for it.
The regset code that ptrace uses provides an ->active() handler in
addition to the get/set ones. For shadow stack this ->active() handler
verifies that shadow stack is enabled via the ARCH_SHSTK_SHSTK bit in the
thread struct. The ->active() handler is checked from some call sites of
the regset get/set handlers, but not the ptrace ones. This was not
understood when shadow stack support was put in place.
As a result, both the set/get handlers can be called with
XFEATURE_CET_USER in its init state, which would cause get_xsave_addr() to
return NULL and trigger a WARN_ON(). The ssp_set() handler luckily has an
ssp_active() check to avoid surprising the kernel with shadow stack
behavior when the kernel is not ready for it (ARCH_SHSTK_SHSTK==0). That
check just happened to avoid the warning.
But the ->get() side wasn't so lucky. It can be called with shadow stacks
disabled, triggering the warning in practice, as reported by Christina
Schimpe:
WARNING: CPU: 5 PID: 1773 at arch/x86/kernel/fpu/regset.c:19...
Classification
CVE ID: CVE-2025-21632
Affected Products
Vendor: Linux
Product: Linux
Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)
EPSS Score: 0.05% (probability of being exploited)
EPSS Percentile: 17.97% (scored less or equal to compared to others)
EPSS Date: 2025-02-17 (when was this score calculated)
References
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0a3a872214188e4268d31581ed0cd44508e038cfhttps://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6bfe1fc22f462bec87422cdcbec4d7a2f43ff01d
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a9d9c33132d49329ada647e4514d210d15e31d81