CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-21958 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 4.7

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: Revert "openvswitch: switch to per-action label counting in conntrack" Currently, ovs_ct_set_labels() is only called for confirmed conntrack entries (ct) within ovs_ct_commit(). However, if the conntrack entry does not have the labels_ext extension, attempting to allocate it in ovs_ct_get_conn_labels() for a confirmed entry triggers a warning in nf_ct_ext_add(): WARN_ON(nf_ct_is_confirmed(ct)); This happens when the conntrack entry is created externally before OVS increments net->ct.labels_used. The issue has become more likely since commit fcb1aa5163b1 ("openvswitch: switch to per-action label counting in conntrack"), which changed to use per-action label counting and increment net->ct.labels_used when a flow with ct action is added. Since there’s no straightforward way to fully resolve this issue at the moment, this reverts the commit to avoid breaking existing use cases.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4.7 (3.1)
Published
2025-04-01
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-367

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 6.14

Showing 2 representative product identities from 8 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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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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