CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-21683 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bpf: Fix bpf_sk_select_reuseport() memory leak As pointed out in the original comment, lookup in sockmap can return a TCP ESTABLISHED socket. Such TCP socket may have had SO_ATTACH_REUSEPORT_EBPF set before it was ESTABLISHED. In other words, a non-NULL sk_reuseport_cb does not imply a non-refcounted socket. Drop sk's reference in both error paths. unreferenced object 0xffff888101911800 (size 2048): comm "test_progs", pid 44109, jiffies 4297131437 hex dump (first 32 bytes): 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ 80 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ backtrace (crc 9336483b): __kmalloc_noprof+0x3bf/0x560 __reuseport_alloc+0x1d/0x40 reuseport_alloc+0xca/0x150 reuseport_attach_prog+0x87/0x140 sk_reuseport_attach_bpf+0xc8/0x100 sk_setsockopt+0x1181/0x1990 do_sock_setsockopt+0x12b/0x160 __sys_setsockopt+0x7b/0xc0 __x64_sys_setsockopt+0x1b/0x30 do_syscall_64+0x93/0x180 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x76/0x7e

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-01-31
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 6.13

Showing 2 representative product identities from 11 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

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

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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