Bug 2389491 (CVE-2025-38614)

Summary: CVE-2025-38614 kernel: eventpoll: Fix semi-unbounded recursion
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-08-19 18:03:49 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

eventpoll: Fix semi-unbounded recursion

Ensure that epoll instances can never form a graph deeper than
EP_MAX_NESTS+1 links.

Currently, ep_loop_check_proc() ensures that the graph is loop-free and
does some recursion depth checks, but those recursion depth checks don't
limit the depth of the resulting tree for two reasons:

 - They don't look upwards in the tree.
 - If there are multiple downwards paths of different lengths, only one of
   the paths is actually considered for the depth check since commit
   28d82dc1c4ed ("epoll: limit paths").

Essentially, the current recursion depth check in ep_loop_check_proc() just
serves to prevent it from recursing too deeply while checking for loops.

A more thorough check is done in reverse_path_check() after the new graph
edge has already been created; this checks, among other things, that no
paths going upwards from any non-epoll file with a length of more than 5
edges exist. However, this check does not apply to non-epoll files.

As a result, it is possible to recurse to a depth of at least roughly 500,
tested on v6.15. (I am unsure if deeper recursion is possible; and this may
have changed with commit 8c44dac8add7 ("eventpoll: Fix priority inversion
problem").)

To fix it:

1. In ep_loop_check_proc(), note the subtree depth of each visited node,
and use subtree depths for the total depth calculation even when a subtree
has already been visited.
2. Add ep_get_upwards_depth_proc() for similarly determining the maximum
depth of an upwards walk.
3. In ep_loop_check(), use these values to limit the total path length
between epoll nodes to EP_MAX_NESTS edges.

Comment 4 errata-xmlrpc 2025-10-13 04:01:38 UTC
This issue has been addressed in the following products:

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

Via RHSA-2025:17760 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2025:17760