CVE-2025-68231

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

7.8 HighFix available

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.

Attack profile

How easy it is to exploit

Attack vector: Local
Complexity: Low
Privileges needed: Low
User interaction: None

What an attacker can affect

Confidentiality: High
Integrity: High
Availability: High

Exploit likelihood

0.19%Up 0.2 points since Dec 17, 2025

What each source reports

OSV Score usedOESA-2026-1566 7.8

kernel security update

The Linux Kernel, the operating system core itself.

Security Fix(es):

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

udp: Deal with race between UDP socket address change and rehash

If a UDP socket changes its local address while it's receiving datagrams, as a result of connect(), there is a period during which a lookup operation might fail to find it, after the address is changed but before the secondary hash (port and address) and the four-tuple hash (local and remote ports and addresses) are updated.

Secondary hash chains were introduced by commit 30fff9231fad ("udp: bind() optimisation") and, as a result, a rehash operation became needed to make a bound socket reachable again after a connect().

This operation was introduced by commit 719f835853a9 ("udp: add rehash on connect()") which isn't however a complete fix: the socket will be found once the rehashing completes, but not while it's pending.

This is noticeable with a socat(1) server in UDP4-LISTEN mode, and a client sending datagrams to it. After the server receives the first datagram (cf. _xioopen_ipdgram_listen()), it issues a connect() to the address of the sender, in order to set up a directed flow.

Now, if the client, running on a different CPU thread, happens to send a (subsequent) datagram while the server's socket changes its address, but is not rehashed yet, this will result in a failed lookup and a port unreachable error delivered to the client, as apparent from the following reproducer:

LEN=$(($(cat /proc/sys/net/core/wmem_default) / 4)) dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1 count=${LEN} of=tmp.in

while :; do taskset -c 1 socat UDP4-LISTEN:1337,null-eof OPEN:tmp.out,create,trunc & sleep 0.1 || sleep 1 taskset -c 2 socat OPEN:tmp.in UDP4:localhost:1337,shut-null wait done

where the client will eventually get ECONNREFUSED on a write() (typically the second or third one of a given iteration):

2024/11/13 21:28:23 socat[46901] E write(6, 0x556db2e3c000, 8192): Connection refused

This issue was first observed as a seldom failure in Podman's tests checking UDP functionality while using pasta(1) to connect the container's network namespace, which leads us to a reproducer with the lookup error resulting in an ICMP packet on a tap device:

LOCAL_ADDR="$(ip -j -4 addr show|jq -rM '.[] | .addr_info[0] | select(.scope == "global").local')"

while :; do ./pasta --config-net -p pasta.pcap -u 1337 socat UDP4-LISTEN:1337,null-eof OPEN:tmp.out,create,trunc & sleep 0.2 || sleep 1 socat OPEN:tmp.in UDP4:${LOCAL_ADDR}:1337,shut-null wait cmp tmp.in tmp.out done

Once this fails:

tmp.in tmp.out differ: char 8193, line 29

we can finally have a look at what's going on:

$ tshark -r pasta.pcap 1 0.000000 :: ? ff02::16 ICMPv6 110 Multicast Listener Report Message v2 2 0.168690 88.198.0.161 ? 88.198.0.164 UDP 8234 60260 ? 1337 Len=8192 3 0.168767 88.198.0.161 ? 88.198.0.164 UDP 8234 60260 ? 1337 Len=8192 4 0.168806 88.198.0.161 ? 88.198.0.164 UDP 8234 60260 ? 1337 Len=8192 5 0.168827 c6:47:05:8d:dc:04 ? Broadcast ARP 42 Who has 88.198.0.161? Tell 88.198.0.164 6 0.168851 9a:55:9a:55:9a:55 ? c6:47:05:8d:dc:04 ARP 42 88.198.0.161 is at 9a:55:9a:55:9a:55 7 0.168875 88.198.0.161 ? 88.198.0.164 UDP 8234 60260 ? 1337 Len=8192 8 0.168896 88.198.0.164 ? 88.198.0.161 ICMP 590 Destination unreachable (Port unreachable) 9 0.168926 88.198.0.161 ? 88.198.0.164 UDP 8234 60260 ? 1337 Len=8192 10 0.168959 88.198.0.161 ? 88.198.0.164 UDP 8234 60260 ? 1337 Len=8192 11 0.168989 88.198.0.161 ? 88.198.0.164 UDP 4138 60260 ? 1337 Len=4096 12 0.169010 88.198.0.161 ? 88.198.0.164 UDP 42 60260 ? 1337 Len=0

On the third datagram received, the network namespace of the container initiates an ARP lookup to deliver the ICMP message.

In another…

Record: OESA-2026-1566
CVSS 3.1: 7.8 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Updated: 2026-11-02

OSV Score usedOESA-2026-1567 7.8