CVE-2025-68299

/// Technical description

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

afs: Fix delayed allocation of a cell's anonymous key

The allocation of a cell's anonymous key is done in a background thread

along with other cell setup such as doing a DNS upcall. In the reported

bug, this is triggered by afs_parse_source() parsing the device name given

to mount() and calling afs_lookup_cell() with the name of the cell.

The normal key lookup then tries to use the key description on the

anonymous authentication key as the reference for request_key() - but it

may not yet be set and so an oops can happen.

This has been made more likely to happen by the fix for dynamic lookup

failure.

Fix this by firstly allocating a reference name and attaching it to the

afs_cell record when the record is created. It can share the memory

allocation with the cell name (unfortunately it can't just overlap the cell

name by prepending it with "afs@" as the cell name already has a '.'

prepended for other purposes). T

/// Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories, patches, and mitigation guidance. 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.

/// References