CVE-2025-21664

Disclosure Date: January 21, 2025 •

CVE-2025-21664

MITRE ATT&CK

Add MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques that apply to this CVE.

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

dm thin: make get_first_thin use rcu-safe list first function

The documentation in rculist.h explains the absence of list_empty_rcu()
and cautions programmers against relying on a list_empty() –>
list_first() sequence in RCU safe code. This is because each of these
functions performs its own READ_ONCE() of the list head. This can lead
to a situation where the list_empty() sees a valid list entry, but the
subsequent list_first() sees a different view of list head state after a
modification.

In the case of dm-thin, this author had a production box crash from a GP
fault in the process_deferred_bios path. This function saw a valid list
head in get_first_thin() but when it subsequently dereferenced that and
turned it into a thin_c, it got the inside of the struct pool, since the
list was now empty and referring to itself. The kernel on which this
occurred printed both a warning about a refcount_t being saturated, and
a UBSAN error for an out-of-bounds cpuid access in the queued spinlock,
prior to the fault itself. When the resulting kdump was examined, it
was possible to see another thread patiently waiting in thin_dtr’s
synchronize_rcu.

The thin_dtr call managed to pull the thin_c out of the active thins
list (and have it be the last entry in the active_thins list) at just
the wrong moment which lead to this crash.

Fortunately, the fix here is straight forward. Switch get_first_thin()
function to use list_first_or_null_rcu() which performs just a single
READ_ONCE() and returns NULL if the list is already empty.

This was run against the devicemapper test suite’s thin-provisioning
suites for delete and suspend and no regressions were observed.