CVE-2025-38708

Technical Description

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

drbd: add missing kref_get in handle_write_conflicts

With `two-primaries` enabled, DRBD tries to detect "concurrent" writes

and handle write conflicts, so that even if you write to the same sector

simultaneously on both nodes, they end up with the identical data once

the writes are completed.

In handling "superseeded" writes, we forgot a kref_get,

resulting in a premature drbd_destroy_device and use after free,

and further to kernel crashes with symptoms.

Relevance: No one should use DRBD as a random data generator, and apparently

all users of "two-primaries" handle concurrent writes correctly on layer up.

That is cluster file systems use some distributed lock manager,

and live migration in virtualization environments stops writes on one node

before starting writes on the other node.

Which means that other than for "test cases",

this code path is never taken in real life.

FYI, in DRBD 9, things are handled differ

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from linux. Update linux_kernel to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

Affected Products

References