CVE-2025-21864

medium

Published 2025-11-11 · Modified 2025-11-19

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CVSS v3

5.5

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

5.5

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.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

55%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

OS	Version	Status	Fixed in
rhel	9	fixed
sles		affected
rocky	9	fixed
debian	bookworm	fixed	`6.1.133-1`
debian	bullseye	fixed	`0`
debian	forky	fixed	`6.12.17-1`
debian	sid	fixed	`6.12.17-1`
debian	trixie	fixed	`6.12.17-1`
linux-kernel		affected	`6.1.130`
linux-kernel	6.14	affected
almalinux	9	fixed	`kernel-doc-5.14.0-611.5.1.el9_7.noarch.rpm`

References

CWEs

CWE-476

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.