Skip to content
Fencer Vulns
high 7.8

CVE-2025-39791 json

dm: dm-crypt: Do not partially accept write BIOs with zoned targets

published 2025-09-11 13 mo ago modified 2026-10-19 20 d ago also EUVD-2025-28922

cvss
7.8
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.1%
EPSS 0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 2%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

dm: dm-crypt: Do not partially accept write BIOs with zoned targets

Read and write operations issued to a dm-crypt target may be split according to the dm-crypt internal limits defined by the max_read_size and max_write_size module parameters (default is 128 KB). The intent is to improve processing time of large BIOs by splitting them into smaller operations that can be parallelized on different CPUs.

For zoned dm-crypt targets, this BIO splitting is still done but without the parallel execution to ensure that the issuing order of write operations to the underlying devices remains sequential. However, the splitting itself causes other problems:

1) Since dm-crypt relies on the block layer zone write plugging to handle zone append emulation using regular write operations, the reminder of a split write BIO will always be plugged into the target zone write plugged. Once the on-going write BIO finishes, this reminder BIO is unplugged and issued from the zone write plug work. If this reminder BIO itself needs to be split, the reminder will be re-issued and plugged again, but that causes a call to a blk_queue_enter(), which may block if a queue freeze operation was initiated. This results in a deadlock as DM submission still holds BIOs that the queue freeze side is waiting for.

2) dm-crypt relies on the emulation done by the block layer using regular write operations for processing zone append operations. This still requires to properly return the written sector as the BIO sector of the original BIO. However, this can be done correctly only and only if there is a single clone BIO used for processing the original zone append operation issued by the user. If the size of a zone append operation is larger than dm-crypt max_write_size, then the orginal BIO will be split and processed as a chain of regular write operations. Such chaining result in an incorrect written sector being returned to the zone append issuer using the original BIO sector. This in turn results in file system data corruptions using xfs or btrfs.

Fix this by modifying get_max_request_size() to always return the size of the BIO to avoid it being split with dm_accpet_partial_bio() in crypt_map(). get_max_request_size() is renamed to get_max_request_sectors() to clarify the unit of the value returned and its interface is changed to take a struct dm_target pointer and a pointer to the struct bio being processed. In addition to this change, to ensure that crypt_alloc_buffer() works correctly, set the dm-crypt device max_hw_sectors limit to be at most BIO_MAX_VECS << PAGE_SECTORS_SHIFT (1 MB with a 4KB page architecture). This forces DM core to split write BIOs before passing them to crypt_map(), and thus guaranteeing that dm-crypt can always accept an entire write BIO without needing to split it.

This change does not have any effect on the read path of dm-crypt. Read operations can still be split and the BIO fragments processed in parallel. There is also no impact on the performance of the write path given that all zone write BIOs were already processed inline instead of in parallel.

This change also does not affect in any way regular dm-crypt block devices.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.12.44, 6.16.4, 6.17
  • linux Debian 13 6.12.48-1
  • linux Debian 14 6.16.5-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2025-39791

  • kernel-rt Linux Micro 6.2 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-64kb SLES 16.0, Linux Micro 6.2, SLES for SAP applications 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-source SLES 16.0, Linux Micro 6.2, SLES for SAP applications 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-default SLES 16.0, SLE High Availability Extension 16.0, Linux Micro 6.2 +1 more 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-default-base SLES 16.0, Linux Micro 6.2, SLES for SAP applications 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1.160000.2.4
  • kernel-syms SLES 16.0, Linux Micro Extras 6.2, SLES for SAP applications 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-obs-qa SLES for SAP applications 16.0, SLES 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-kvmsmall SLES for SAP applications 16.0, SLES 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2025:21074-1SUSE-SU-2025:21139-1SUSE-SU-2026:20560-1SUSE-SU-2025:21179-1

  • kernel-rt openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • dtb-aarch64 openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-64kb openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-syms openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-obs-qa openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-source openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-default openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1
  • kernel-kvmsmall openSUSE Leap 16.0 6.12.0-160000.6.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2025:20081-1

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-2025-39791 updated cvss 6.1

kernel: dm: dm-crypt: Do not partially accept write BIOs with zoned targets

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    affected: no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • 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
    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

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
total
Assessed
24 d ago

Exploit prediction

0.13% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 2% 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

Weakness
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.