CVE-2025-21893

unknown
Published — · Modified —
CVSS v3
CVSS v4 NEW
not yet in upstream
VIR risk

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.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
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

suse SUSE Affected 1 release
VersionStatusFixed in
Affected
debian Debian Fixed 5 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
trixie Fixed 6.12.21-1
sid Fixed 6.12.21-1
forky Fixed 6.12.21-1
bullseye Fixed 0
bookworm Fixed 0

References

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

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