Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

tcp: drop secpath at the same time as we currently drop dst

Xiumei reported hitting the WARN in xfrm6_tunnel_net_exit while
running tests that boil down to:
- create a pair of netns
- run a basic TCP test over ipcomp6
- delete the pair of netns

The xfrm_state found on spi_byaddr was not deleted at the time we
delete the netns, because we still have a reference on it. This
lingering reference comes from a secpath (which holds a ref on the
xfrm_state), which is still attached to an skb. This skb is not
leaked, it ends up on sk_receive_queue and then gets defer-free'd by
skb_attempt_defer_free.

The problem happens when we defer freeing an skb (push it on one CPU's
defer_list), and don't flush that list before the netns is deleted. In
that case, we still have a reference on the xfrm_state that we don't
expect at this point.

We already drop the skb's dst in the TCP receive path when it's no
longer needed, so let's also drop the secpath. At this point,
tcp_filter has already called into the LSM hooks that may require the
secpath, so it should not be needed anymore. However, in some of those
places, the MPTCP extension has just been attached to the skb, so we
cannot simply drop all extensions.

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2025-21864

Affected Products

Vendor: Linux, Linux

Product: Linux, Linux

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.02% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 1.77% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-04-10 (when was this score calculated)

References

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-21864
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/87858bbf21da239ace300d61dd209907995c0491
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f1d5e6a5e468308af7759cf5276779d3155c5e98
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/cd34a07f744451e2ecf9005bb7d24d0b2fb83656
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/69cafd9413084cd5012cf5d7c7ec6f3d493726d9
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/9b6412e6979f6f9e0632075f8f008937b5cd4efd

Timeline