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Fencer Vulns
high 7.8

CVE-2025-21823 json

batman-adv: Drop unmanaged ELP metric worker

published 2025-02-27 20 mo ago modified 2026-08-05 3 mo ago also EUVD-2025-5979

cvss
7.8
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 15%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

batman-adv: Drop unmanaged ELP metric worker

The ELP worker needs to calculate new metric values for all neighbors "reachable" over an interface. Some of the used metric sources require locks which might need to sleep. This sleep is incompatible with the RCU list iterator used for the recorded neighbors. The initial approach to work around of this problem was to queue another work item per neighbor and then run this in a new context.

Even when this solved the RCU vs might_sleep() conflict, it has a major problems: Nothing was stopping the work item in case it is not needed anymore - for example because one of the related interfaces was removed or the batman-adv module was unloaded - resulting in potential invalid memory accesses.

Directly canceling the metric worker also has various problems:

* cancel_work_sync for a to-be-deactivated interface is called with rtnl_lock held. But the code in the ELP metric worker also tries to use rtnl_lock() - which will never return in this case. This also means that cancel_work_sync would never return because it is waiting for the worker to finish. * iterating over the neighbor list for the to-be-deactivated interface is currently done using the RCU specific methods. Which means that it is possible to miss items when iterating over it without the associated spinlock - a behaviour which is acceptable for a periodic metric check but not for a cleanup routine (which must "stop" all still running workers)

The better approch is to get rid of the per interface neighbor metric worker and handle everything in the interface worker. The original problems are solved by:

* creating a list of neighbors which require new metric information inside the RCU protected context, gathering the metric according to the new list outside the RCU protected context * only use rcu_trylock inside metric gathering code to avoid a deadlock when the cancel_delayed_work_sync is called in the interface removal code (which is called with the rtnl_lock held)

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 5.4.291, 5.10.235, 5.15.179, 6.1.129, 6.6.79, 6.12.16, 6.13.4, 6.14
  • linux Debian 12 6.1.129-1
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13 6.12.16-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2025-21823

  • linux Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-216.236
  • linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-140.150
  • linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-78.78
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1146.156
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1084.91
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1035.37
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1149.158
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1083.92

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2025-21823

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • kernel-coco SLE Module for Confidential Computing Technical Preview 15 SP6 6.4.0-15061.21.coco15sp6.1
  • kernel-syms-coco SLE Module for Confidential Computing Technical Preview 15 SP6 6.4.0-15061.21.coco15sp6.1
  • kernel-coco_debug SLE Module for Confidential Computing Technical Preview 15 SP6 6.4.0-15061.21.coco15sp6.1
  • kernel-source-coco SLE Module for Confidential Computing Technical Preview 15 SP6 6.4.0-15061.21.coco15sp6.1
  • kernel-source Linux Micro 6.1, Linux Micro 6.0 6.4.0-28.1
  • kernel-default Linux Micro 6.1, Linux Micro 6.0 6.4.0-28.1
  • kernel-kvmsmall Linux Micro 6.1, Linux Micro 6.0 6.4.0-28.1
  • kernel-default-base Linux Micro 6.1, Linux Micro 6.0 6.4.0-28.1.21.6

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2025:01919-1SUSE-SU-2025:20192-1SUSE-SU-2025:20270-1SUSE-SU-2025:20190-1SUSE-SU-2025:20260-1SUSE-SU-2025:1180-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2025-21823 updated

kernel: batman-adv: Drop unmanaged ELP metric worker

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.24% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 15% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.