Bug 2356657 (CVE-2025-21922) - CVE-2025-21922 kernel: ppp: Fix KMSAN uninit-value warning with bpf
Summary: CVE-2025-21922 kernel: ppp: Fix KMSAN uninit-value warning with bpf
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2025-21922
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
low
low
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security DevOps Team
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2025-04-01 16:04 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2025-04-02 02:26 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed:
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-04-01 16:04:43 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ppp: Fix KMSAN uninit-value warning with bpf

Syzbot caught an "KMSAN: uninit-value" warning [1], which is caused by the
ppp driver not initializing a 2-byte header when using socket filter.

The following code can generate a PPP filter BPF program:
'''
struct bpf_program fp;
pcap_t *handle;
handle = pcap_open_dead(DLT_PPP_PPPD, 65535);
pcap_compile(handle, &fp, "ip and outbound", 0, 0);
bpf_dump(&fp, 1);
'''
Its output is:
'''
(000) ldh [2]
(001) jeq #0x21 jt 2 jf 5
(002) ldb [0]
(003) jeq #0x1 jt 4 jf 5
(004) ret #65535
(005) ret #0
'''
Wen can find similar code at the following link:
https://github.com/ppp-project/ppp/blob/master/pppd/options.c#L1680
The maintainer of this code repository is also the original maintainer
of the ppp driver.

As you can see the BPF program skips 2 bytes of data and then reads the
'Protocol' field to determine if it's an IP packet. Then it read the first
byte of the first 2 bytes to determine the direction.

The issue is that only the first byte indicating direction is initialized
in current ppp driver code while the second byte is not initialized.

For normal BPF programs generated by libpcap, uninitialized data won't be
used, so it's not a problem. However, for carefully crafted BPF programs,
such as those generated by syzkaller [2], which start reading from offset
0, the uninitialized data will be used and caught by KMSAN.

[1] https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=853242d9c9917165d791
[2] https://syzkaller.appspot.com/text?tag=ReproC&x=11994913980000


Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.