cve/published/2025/CVE-2025-21825.mbox

From bippy-5f407fcff5a0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
To: <linux-cve-announce@vger.kernel.org>
Reply-to: <cve@kernel.org>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: CVE-2025-21825: bpf: Cancel the running bpf_timer through kworker for PREEMPT_RT

Description
===========

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

bpf: Cancel the running bpf_timer through kworker for PREEMPT_RT

During the update procedure, when overwrite element in a pre-allocated
htab, the freeing of old_element is protected by the bucket lock. The
reason why the bucket lock is necessary is that the old_element has
already been stashed in htab->extra_elems after alloc_htab_elem()
returns. If freeing the old_element after the bucket lock is unlocked,
the stashed element may be reused by concurrent update procedure and the
freeing of old_element will run concurrently with the reuse of the
old_element. However, the invocation of check_and_free_fields() may
acquire a spin-lock which violates the lockdep rule because its caller
has already held a raw-spin-lock (bucket lock). The following warning
will be reported when such race happens:

  BUG: scheduling while atomic: test_progs/676/0x00000003
  3 locks held by test_progs/676:
  #0: ffffffff864b0240 (rcu_read_lock_trace){....}-{0:0}, at: bpf_prog_test_run_syscall+0x2c0/0x830
  #1: ffff88810e961188 (&htab->lockdep_key){....}-{2:2}, at: htab_map_update_elem+0x306/0x1500
  #2: ffff8881f4eac1b8 (&base->softirq_expiry_lock){....}-{2:2}, at: hrtimer_cancel_wait_running+0xe9/0x1b0
  Modules linked in: bpf_testmod(O)
  Preemption disabled at:
  [<ffffffff817837a3>] htab_map_update_elem+0x293/0x1500
  CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 676 Comm: test_progs Tainted: G ... 6.12.0+ #11
  Tainted: [W]=WARN, [O]=OOT_MODULE
  Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996)...
  Call Trace:
  <TASK>
  dump_stack_lvl+0x57/0x70
  dump_stack+0x10/0x20
  __schedule_bug+0x120/0x170
  __schedule+0x300c/0x4800
  schedule_rtlock+0x37/0x60
  rtlock_slowlock_locked+0x6d9/0x54c0
  rt_spin_lock+0x168/0x230
  hrtimer_cancel_wait_running+0xe9/0x1b0
  hrtimer_cancel+0x24/0x30
  bpf_timer_delete_work+0x1d/0x40
  bpf_timer_cancel_and_free+0x5e/0x80
  bpf_obj_free_fields+0x262/0x4a0
  check_and_free_fields+0x1d0/0x280
  htab_map_update_elem+0x7fc/0x1500
  bpf_prog_9f90bc20768e0cb9_overwrite_cb+0x3f/0x43
  bpf_prog_ea601c4649694dbd_overwrite_timer+0x5d/0x7e
  bpf_prog_test_run_syscall+0x322/0x830
  __sys_bpf+0x135d/0x3ca0
  __x64_sys_bpf+0x75/0xb0
  x64_sys_call+0x1b5/0xa10
  do_syscall_64+0x3b/0xc0
  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x4b/0x53
  ...
  </TASK>

It seems feasible to break the reuse and refill of per-cpu extra_elems
into two independent parts: reuse the per-cpu extra_elems with bucket
lock being held and refill the old_element as per-cpu extra_elems after
the bucket lock is unlocked. However, it will make the concurrent
overwrite procedures on the same CPU return unexpected -E2BIG error when
the map is full.

Therefore, the patch fixes the lock problem by breaking the cancelling
of bpf_timer into two steps for PREEMPT_RT:
1) use hrtimer_try_to_cancel() and check its return value
2) if the timer is running, use hrtimer_cancel() through a kworker to
   cancel it again
Considering that the current implementation of hrtimer_cancel() will try
to acquire a being held softirq_expiry_lock when the current timer is
running, these steps above are reasonable. However, it also has
downside. When the timer is running, the cancelling of the timer is
delayed when releasing the last map uref. The delay is also fixable
(e.g., break the cancelling of bpf timer into two parts: one part in
locked scope, another one in unlocked scope), it can be revised later if
necessary.

It is a bit hard to decide the right fix tag. One reason is that the
problem depends on PREEMPT_RT which is enabled in v6.12. Considering the
softirq_expiry_lock lock exists since v5.4 and bpf_timer is introduced
in v5.15, the bpf_timer commit is used in the fixes tag and an extra
depends-on tag is added to state the dependency on PREEMPT_RT.

Depends-on: v6.12+ with PREEMPT_RT enabled

The Linux kernel CVE team has assigned CVE-2025-21825 to this issue.


Affected and fixed versions
===========================

	Issue introduced in 5.15 with commit b00628b1c7d595ae5b544e059c27b1f5828314b4 and fixed in 6.12.13 with commit 33e47d9573075342a41783a55c8c67bc71246fc1
	Issue introduced in 5.15 with commit b00628b1c7d595ae5b544e059c27b1f5828314b4 and fixed in 6.13.2 with commit fbeda3d939ca10063aafa7a77cc0f409d82cda88
	Issue introduced in 5.15 with commit b00628b1c7d595ae5b544e059c27b1f5828314b4 and fixed in 6.14 with commit 58f038e6d209d2dd862fcf5de55407855856794d

Please see https://www.kernel.org for a full list of currently supported
kernel versions by the kernel community.

Unaffected versions might change over time as fixes are backported to
older supported kernel versions.  The official CVE entry at
	https://cve.org/CVERecord/?id=CVE-2025-21825
will be updated if fixes are backported, please check that for the most
up to date information about this issue.


Affected files
==============

The file(s) affected by this issue are:
	kernel/bpf/helpers.c


Mitigation
==========

The Linux kernel CVE team recommends that you update to the latest
stable kernel version for this, and many other bugfixes.  Individual
changes are never tested alone, but rather are part of a larger kernel
release.  Cherry-picking individual commits is not recommended or
supported by the Linux kernel community at all.  If however, updating to
the latest release is impossible, the individual changes to resolve this
issue can be found at these commits:
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/33e47d9573075342a41783a55c8c67bc71246fc1
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/fbeda3d939ca10063aafa7a77cc0f409d82cda88
	https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/58f038e6d209d2dd862fcf5de55407855856794d