Bug 2429061 (CVE-2025-68788) - CVE-2025-68788 kernel: fsnotify: do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events on child for special files
Summary: CVE-2025-68788 kernel: fsnotify: do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events on chil...
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2025-68788
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: 2026-01-13 16:03 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2026-01-15 02:50 UTC (History)
0 users

Fixed In Version:
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Environment:
Last Closed:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-01-13 16:03:55 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

fsnotify: do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events on child for special files

inotify/fanotify do not allow users with no read access to a file to
subscribe to events (e.g. IN_ACCESS/IN_MODIFY), but they do allow the
same user to subscribe for watching events on children when the user
has access to the parent directory (e.g. /dev).

Users with no read access to a file but with read access to its parent
directory can still stat the file and see if it was accessed/modified
via atime/mtime change.

The same is not true for special files (e.g. /dev/null). Users will not
generally observe atime/mtime changes when other users read/write to
special files, only when someone sets atime/mtime via utimensat().

Align fsnotify events with this stat behavior and do not generate
ACCESS/MODIFY events to parent watchers on read/write of special files.
The events are still generated to parent watchers on utimensat(). This
closes some side-channels that could be possibly used for information
exfiltration [1].

[1] https://snee.la/pdf/pubs/file-notification-attacks.pdf


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