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CVE-2025-68788

fsnotify: do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events on child for special files

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 5.10.248, 5.15.198, 6.1.160, 6.6.120, 6.12.64, and 1 more
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
  • Exploitation: none
  • Automatable: no
  • Technical impact: partial

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: fsnotify: do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events on child for special files inotify/fanotify do not allow users with no read access to a file to subscribe to events (e.g. IN_ACCESS/IN_MODIFY), but they do allow the same user to subscribe for watching events on children when the user has access to the parent directory (e.g. /dev). Users with no read access to a file but with read access to its parent directory can still stat the file and see if it was accessed/modified via atime/mtime change. The same is not true for special files (e.g. /dev/null). Users will not generally observe atime/mtime changes when other users read/write to special files, only when someone sets atime/mtime via utimensat(). Align fsnotify events with this stat behavior and do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events to parent watchers on read/write of special files. The events are still generated to parent watchers on utimensat(). This closes some side-channels that could be possibly used for information exfiltration [1]. [1] https://snee.la/pdf/pubs/file-notification-attacks.pdf

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. CISA SSVC assessment

    Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • Linux Linux

    From 72acc854427948efed7a83da27f7dc3239ac9afc · fixed in df2711544b050aba703e6da418c53c7dc5d443ca; From 72acc854427948efed7a83da27f7dc3239ac9afc · fixed in 859bdf438f01d9aa7f84b09c1202d548c7cad9e8; From 72acc854427948efed7a83da27f7dc3239ac9afc · fixed in 6a7d7d96eeeab7af2bd01afbb3d9878a11a13d91; From 72acc854427948efed7a83da27f7dc3239ac9afc · fixed in e0643d46759db8b84c0504a676043e5e341b6c81; From 72acc854427948efed7a83da27f7dc3239ac9afc · fixed in 82f7416bcbd951549e758d15fc1a96a5afc2e900; From 72acc854427948efed7a83da27f7dc3239ac9afc · fixed in 7a93edb23bcf07a3aaf8b598edfc2faa8fbcc0b6; From 72acc854427948efed7a83da27f7dc3239ac9afc · fixed in 635bc4def026a24e071436f4f356ea08c0eed6ff

  • Linux Linux

    2.6.36

  • KernelLinux

    From 2.6.36 · fixed in 5.10.248; From 5.11.0 · fixed in 5.15.198; From 5.16.0 · fixed in 6.1.160; From 6.2.0 · fixed in 6.6.120; From 6.7.0 · fixed in 6.12.64; From 6.13.0 · fixed in 6.18.3

References 7

git.kernel.org