What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-25221

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2020-09-10 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-672

Description

get_gate_page in mm/gup.c in the Linux kernel 5.7.x and 5.8.x before 5.8.7 allows privilege escalation because of incorrect reference counting (caused by gate page mishandling) of the struct page that backs the vsyscall page. The result is a refcount underflow. This can be triggered by any 64-bit process that can use ptrace() or process_vm_readv(), aka CID-9fa2dd946743.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: from 5.7.0 before 5.8.7 — fixed in 5.8.7
• NetApp Cloud Backup: all versions
• NetApp Hci Compute Node: all versions
• NetApp Solidfire, Enterprise Sds & Hci Storage Node: all versions
• NetApp Solidfire & Hci Management Node: all versions
• NetApp Solidfire Baseboard Management Controller: all versions

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.8.7. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/09/10/4
• https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/ChangeLog-5.8.7
• https://git.kernel.org/linus/8891adc61dce2a8a41fc0c23262b681c3ec4b73a
• https://git.kernel.org/linus/9fa2dd946743ae6f30dc4830da19147bf100a7f2
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20201001-0003/
• https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/09/08/4
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/09/10/4
• https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/ChangeLog-5.8.7
• https://git.kernel.org/linus/8891adc61dce2a8a41fc0c23262b681c3ec4b73a
• https://git.kernel.org/linus/9fa2dd946743ae6f30dc4830da19147bf100a7f2
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20201001-0003/
• https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/09/08/4

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