Bug 2393208 (CVE-2025-38708) - CVE-2025-38708 kernel: drbd: add missing kref_get in handle_write_conflicts
Summary: CVE-2025-38708 kernel: drbd: add missing kref_get in handle_write_conflicts
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2025-38708
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability-draft
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security DevOps Team
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2025-09-04 16:05 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2025-09-22 13:26 UTC (History)
0 users

Fixed In Version:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-09-04 16:05:14 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

drbd: add missing kref_get in handle_write_conflicts

With `two-primaries` enabled, DRBD tries to detect "concurrent" writes
and handle write conflicts, so that even if you write to the same sector
simultaneously on both nodes, they end up with the identical data once
the writes are completed.

In handling "superseeded" writes, we forgot a kref_get,
resulting in a premature drbd_destroy_device and use after free,
and further to kernel crashes with symptoms.

Relevance: No one should use DRBD as a random data generator, and apparently
all users of "two-primaries" handle concurrent writes correctly on layer up.
That is cluster file systems use some distributed lock manager,
and live migration in virtualization environments stops writes on one node
before starting writes on the other node.

Which means that other than for "test cases",
this code path is never taken in real life.

FYI, in DRBD 9, things are handled differently nowadays.  We still detect
"write conflicts", but no longer try to be smart about them.
We decided to disconnect hard instead: upper layers must not submit concurrent
writes. If they do, that's their fault.

Comment 1 Mauro Matteo Cascella 2025-09-22 13:26:19 UTC
Upstream advisory:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2025090455-CVE-2025-38708-6792@gregkh/T


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