CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-21632 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: x86/fpu: Ensure shadow stack is active before "getting" registers The x86 shadow stack support has its own set of registers. Those registers are XSAVE-managed, but they are "supervisor state components" which means that userspace can not touch them with XSAVE/XRSTOR. It also means that they are not accessible from the existing ptrace ABI for XSAVE state. Thus, there is a new ptrace get/set interface for it. The regset code that ptrace uses provides an ->active() handler in addition to the get/set ones. For shadow stack this ->active() handler verifies that shadow stack is enabled via the ARCH_SHSTK_SHSTK bit in the thread struct. The ->active() handler is checked from some call sites of the regset get/set handlers, but not the ptrace ones. This was not understood when shadow stack support was put in place. As a result, both the set/get handlers can be called with XFEATURE_CET_USER in its init state, which would cause get_xsave_addr() to return NULL and trigger a WARN_ON(). The ssp_set() handler luckily has an ssp_active() check to avoid surprising the kernel with shadow stack behavior when the kernel is not ready…

Severity

Medium

CVSS

5.5 (3.1)

Published

2025-01-19

CISA KEV

Not currently listed

Ecosystem

linux/kernel

Weaknesses

CWE-476