CVE-2025-40306

Linux Kernel - Denial of Service via OrangeFS Xattr Key Buffer Overflow

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: orangefs: fix xattr related buffer overflow... Willy Tarreau <[email protected]> forwarded me a message from Disclosure <[email protected]> with the following warning: > The helper `xattr_key()` uses the pointer variable in the loop condition > rather than dereferencing it. As `key` is incremented, it remains non-NULL > (until it runs into unmapped memory), so the loop does not terminate on > valid C strings and will walk memory indefinitely, consuming CPU or hanging > the thread. I easily reproduced this with setfattr and getfattr, causing a kernel oops, hung user processes and corrupted orangefs files. Disclosure sent along a diff (not a patch) with a suggested fix, which I based this patch on. After xattr_key started working right, xfstest generic/069 exposed an xattr related memory leak that lead to OOM. xattr_key returns a hashed key. When adding xattrs to the orangefs xattr cache, orangefs used hash_add, a kernel hashing macro. hash_add also hashes the key using hash_log which resulted in additions to the xattr cache going to the wrong hash bucket. generic/069 tortures a single file and orangefs does a getattr for the xattr "security.capability" every time. Orangefs negative caches on xattrs which includes a kmalloc. Since adds to the xattr cache were going to the wrong bucket, every getattr for "security.capability" resulted in another kmalloc, none of which were ever freed. I changed the two uses of hash_add to hlist_add_head instead and the memory leak ceased and generic/069 quit throwing furniture.

Scores

EPSS 0.0007
EPSS Percentile 22.0%

Details

Status published
Products (25)
linux/Kernel 4.6.0 - 5.4.302linux
linux/Kernel 5.11.0 - 5.15.197linux
linux/Kernel 5.16.0 - 6.1.159linux
linux/Kernel 5.5.0 - 5.10.247linux
linux/Kernel 6.13.0 - 6.17.8linux
linux/Kernel 6.2.0 - 6.6.117linux
linux/Kernel 6.7.0 - 6.12.58linux
Linux/Linux < 4.6
Linux/Linux 4.6
Linux/Linux 5.10.247 - 5.10.*
... and 15 more
Published Dec 08, 2025
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026