vulnerability

Red Hat: CVE-2025-21893: kernel: keys: Fix UAF in key_put() (Multiple Advisories)

Severity
6
CVSS
(AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:C/I:N/A:C)
Published
Mar 31, 2025
Added
Jul 9, 2025
Modified
Jan 27, 2026

Description

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

keys: Fix UAF in key_put()

Once a key's reference count has been reduced to 0, the garbage collector
thread may destroy it at any time and so key_put() is not allowed to touch
the key after that point. The most key_put() is normally allowed to do is
to touch key_gc_work as that's a static global variable.

However, in an effort to speed up the reclamation of quota, this is now
done in key_put() once the key's usage is reduced to 0 - but now the code
is looking at the key after the deadline, which is forbidden.

Fix this by using a flag to indicate that a key can be gc'd now rather than
looking at the key's refcount in the garbage collector.

Solutions

no-fix-redhat-rpm-packageredhat-upgrade-kernelredhat-upgrade-kernel-rt
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