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Fencer Vulns
no cvss —

CVE-2025-68231 json

mm/mempool: fix poisoning order>0 pages with HIGHMEM

published 2025-12-16 10 mo ago modified 2026-10-14 25 d ago also EUVD-2025-203665

cvss
—
not scored
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 8%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

mm/mempool: fix poisoning order>0 pages with HIGHMEM

The kernel test has reported:

BUG: unable to handle page fault for address: fffba000 #PF: supervisor write access in kernel mode #PF: error_code(0x0002) - not-present page *pde = 03171067 *pte = 00000000 Oops: Oops: 0002 [#1] CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Tainted: G T 6.18.0-rc2-00031-gec7f31b2a2d3 #1 NONE a1d066dfe789f54bc7645c7989957d2bdee593ca Tainted: [T]=RANDSTRUCT Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996), BIOS 1.16.3-debian-1.16.3-2 04/01/2014 EIP: memset (arch/x86/include/asm/string_32.h:168 arch/x86/lib/memcpy_32.c:17) Code: a5 8b 4d f4 83 e1 03 74 02 f3 a4 83 c4 04 5e 5f 5d 2e e9 73 41 01 00 90 90 90 3e 8d 74 26 00 55 89 e5 57 56 89 c6 89 d0 89 f7 <f3> aa 89 f0 5e 5f 5d 2e e9 53 41 01 00 cc cc cc 55 89 e5 53 57 56 EAX: 0000006b EBX: 00000015 ECX: 001fefff EDX: 0000006b ESI: fffb9000 EDI: fffba000 EBP: c611fbf0 ESP: c611fbe8 DS: 007b ES: 007b FS: 0000 GS: 0000 SS: 0068 EFLAGS: 00010287 CR0: 80050033 CR2: fffba000 CR3: 0316e000 CR4: 00040690 Call Trace: poison_element (mm/mempool.c:83 mm/mempool.c:102) mempool_init_node (mm/mempool.c:142 mm/mempool.c:226) mempool_init_noprof (mm/mempool.c:250 (discriminator 1)) ? mempool_alloc_pages (mm/mempool.c:640) bio_integrity_initfn (block/bio-integrity.c:483 (discriminator 8)) ? mempool_alloc_pages (mm/mempool.c:640) do_one_initcall (init/main.c:1283)

Christoph found out this is due to the poisoning code not dealing properly with CONFIG_HIGHMEM because only the first page is mapped but then the whole potentially high-order page is accessed.

We could give up on HIGHMEM here, but it's straightforward to fix this with a loop that's mapping, poisoning or checking and unmapping individual pages.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.1.159, 6.6.118, 6.12.60, 6.17.10, 6.18
  • linux Debian 12 6.1.159-1
  • linux Debian 13 6.12.63-1
  • linux Debian 14 6.17.10-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2025-68231

  • linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-106.106
  • linux Ubuntu 25.10 6.17.0-19.19
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1050.53
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 25.10 6.17.0-1009.9
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1052.55
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 25.10 6.17.0-1009.9
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1048.53
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1049.49

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2025-68231

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 Azure Linux 3.0 6.6.119.3-1

azure linux advisories AZL-72458

Azure Linux vulnerability data, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, from https://github.com/microsoft/AzureLinuxVulnerabilityData via OSV, under the MIT licence; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. MIT

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-2025-68231 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: mm/mempool: fix poisoning order>0 pages with HIGHMEM

  • 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 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
    affected: no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 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

0.19% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 8% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

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.