CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-21672 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: afs: Fix merge preference rule failure condition syzbot reported a lock held when returning to userspace[1]. This is because if argc is less than 0 and the function returns directly, the held inode lock is not released. Fix this by store the error in ret and jump to done to clean up instead of returning directly. [dh: Modified Lizhi Xu's original patch to make it honour the error code from afs_split_string()] [1] WARNING: lock held when returning to user space! 6.13.0-rc3-syzkaller-00209-g499551201b5f #0 Not tainted ------------------------------------------------ syz-executor133/5823 is leaving the kernel with locks still held! 1 lock held by syz-executor133/5823: #0: ffff888071cffc00 (&sb->s_type->i_mutex_key#9){++++}-{4:4}, at: inode_lock include/linux/fs.h:818 [inline] #0: ffff888071cffc00 (&sb->s_type->i_mutex_key#9){++++}-{4:4}, at: afs_proc_addr_prefs_write+0x2bb/0x14e0 fs/afs/addr_prefs.c:388

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-01-31
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-667

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 6.13

Showing 2 representative product identities from 7 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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