vulnerability

VMware Photon OS: CVE-2025-38396

Severity
5
CVSS
(AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:C)
Published
Jul 25, 2025
Added
Aug 19, 2025
Modified
Oct 23, 2025

Description

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

fs: export anon_inode_make_secure_inode() and fix secretmem LSM bypass

Export anon_inode_make_secure_inode() to allow KVM guest_memfd to create
anonymous inodes with proper security context. This replaces the current
pattern of calling alloc_anon_inode() followed by
inode_init_security_anon() for creating security context manually.

This change also fixes a security regression in secretmem where the
S_PRIVATE flag was not cleared after alloc_anon_inode(), causing
LSM/SELinux checks to be bypassed for secretmem file descriptors.

As guest_memfd currently resides in the KVM module, we need to export this
symbol for use outside the core kernel. In the future, guest_memfd might be
moved to core-mm, at which point the symbols no longer would have to be
exported. When/if that happens is still unclear.

Solution

vmware-photon_os_update_tdnf
Title
NEW

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