CVE-2025-40183

Linux Kernel Memory Leak in BPF Redirect Neighbor Helper

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bpf: Fix metadata_dst leak __bpf_redirect_neigh_v{4,6} Cilium has a BPF egress gateway feature which forces outgoing K8s Pod traffic to pass through dedicated egress gateways which then SNAT the traffic in order to interact with stable IPs outside the cluster. The traffic is directed to the gateway via vxlan tunnel in collect md mode. A recent BPF change utilized the bpf_redirect_neigh() helper to forward packets after the arrival and decap on vxlan, which turned out over time that the kmalloc-256 slab usage in kernel was ever-increasing. The issue was that vxlan allocates the metadata_dst object and attaches it through a fake dst entry to the skb. The latter was never released though given bpf_redirect_neigh() was merely setting the new dst entry via skb_dst_set() without dropping an existing one first.

Scores

EPSS 0.0020
EPSS Percentile 10.3%

Details

Status published
Products (22)
linux/Kernel 5.10.0 - 5.10.246linux
linux/Kernel 5.11.0 - 5.15.195linux
linux/Kernel 5.16.0 - 6.1.157linux
linux/Kernel 6.13.0 - 6.17.4linux
linux/Kernel 6.2.0 - 6.6.113linux
linux/Kernel 6.7.0 - 6.12.54linux
Linux/Linux < 5.10
Linux/Linux 5.10
Linux/Linux 5.10.246 - 5.10.*
Linux/Linux 5.15.195 - 5.15.*
... and 12 more
Published Nov 12, 2025
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026