Bug 2390319 (CVE-2025-38616)

Summary: CVE-2025-38616 kernel: Linux kernel: Denial of Service in kTLS due to race condition in receive path
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedKeywords: Security
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: ---
Doc Text:
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's in-kernel TLS (kTLS) receive path. This vulnerability, a race condition, allows data to be consumed from the TCP socket before the kTLS component fully takes control. A local attacker with privileged access to kTLS socket setup could exploit this timing issue, causing the system's internal data processing to reference invalid memory. This could lead to a kernel crash, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) for the affected system.
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-08-22 14:01:38 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

tls: handle data disappearing from under the TLS ULP

TLS expects that it owns the receive queue of the TCP socket.
This cannot be guaranteed in case the reader of the TCP socket
entered before the TLS ULP was installed, or uses some non-standard
read API (eg. zerocopy ones). Replace the WARN_ON() and a buggy
early exit (which leaves anchor pointing to a freed skb) with real
error handling. Wipe the parsing state and tell the reader to retry.

We already reload the anchor every time we (re)acquire the socket lock,
so the only condition we need to avoid is an out of bounds read
(not having enough bytes in the socket for previously parsed record len).

If some data was read from under TLS but there's enough in the queue
we'll reload and decrypt what is most likely not a valid TLS record.
Leading to some undefined behavior from TLS perspective (corrupting
a stream? missing an alert? missing an attack?) but no kernel crash
should take place.