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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2025-38207 json

mm: fix uprobe pte be overwritten when expanding vma

published 2025-07-04 16 mo ago modified 2026-10-21 19 d ago also EUVD-2025-20049

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 11%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

mm: fix uprobe pte be overwritten when expanding vma

Patch series "Fix uprobe pte be overwritten when expanding vma".

This patch (of 4):

We encountered a BUG alert triggered by Syzkaller as follows: BUG: Bad rss-counter state mm:00000000b4a60fca type:MM_ANONPAGES val:1

And we can reproduce it with the following steps: 1. register uprobe on file at zero offset 2. mmap the file at zero offset: addr1 = mmap(NULL, 2 * 4096, PROT_NONE, MAP_PRIVATE, fd, 0); 3. mremap part of vma1 to new vma2: addr2 = mremap(addr1, 4096, 2 * 4096, MREMAP_MAYMOVE); 4. mremap back to orig addr1: mremap(addr2, 4096, 4096, MREMAP_MAYMOVE | MREMAP_FIXED, addr1);

In step 3, the vma1 range [addr1, addr1 + 4096] will be remap to new vma2 with range [addr2, addr2 + 8192], and remap uprobe anon page from the vma1 to vma2, then unmap the vma1 range [addr1, addr1 + 4096].

In step 4, the vma2 range [addr2, addr2 + 4096] will be remap back to the addr range [addr1, addr1 + 4096]. Since the addr range [addr1 + 4096, addr1 + 8192] still maps the file, it will take vma_merge_new_range to expand the range, and then do uprobe_mmap in vma_complete. Since the merged vma pgoff is also zero offset, it will install uprobe anon page to the merged vma. However, the upcomming move_page_tables step, which use set_pte_at to remap the vma2 uprobe pte to the merged vma, will overwrite the newly uprobe pte in the merged vma, and lead that pte to be orphan.

Since the uprobe pte will be remapped to the merged vma, we can remove the unnecessary uprobe_mmap upon merged vma.

This problem was first found in linux-6.6.y and also exists in the community syzkaller: https://lore.kernel.org/all/000000000000ada39605a5e71711@google.com/T/

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.12.114, 6.15.4, 6.16
  • linux Debian 13 6.12.115-2
  • linux Debian 14 6.16.3-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2025-38207

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-2025-38207 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: mm: fix uprobe pte be overwritten when expanding vma

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    affected: no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • 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
    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

0.21% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 11% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

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

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.