CVE-2025-22072: spufs: fix gang directory lifetimes

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2025-04-16 · updated 2026-07-30

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: spufs: fix gang directory lifetimes prior to "[POWERPC] spufs: Fix gang destroy leaks" we used to have a problem with gang lifetimes - creation of a gang returns opened gang directory, which normally gets removed when that gets closed, but if somebody has created a context belonging to that gang and kept it alive until the gang got closed, removal failed and we ended up with a leak. Unfortunately, it had been fixed the wrong way. Dentry of gang directory was no longer pinned, and rmdir on close was gone. One problem was that failure of open kept calling simple_rmdir() as cleanup, which meant an unbalanced dput(). Another bug was in the success case - gang creation incremented link count on root directory, but that was no longer undone when gang got destroyed. Fix consists of * reverting the commit in question * adding a counter to gang, protected by ->i_rwsem of gang directory inode. * having it set to 1 at creation time, dropped in both spufs_dir_close() and spufs_gang_close() and bumped in spufs_create_context(), provided that it's not 0. * using simple_recursive_removal() to take the gang directory out when counter reaches zero.

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 2.6.23 before 6.1.134; from 6.2 before 6.6.87; from 6.7 before 6.12.23; from 6.13 before 6.13.11; from 6.14 before 6.14.2; 2.6.22, 2.6.22-rc5, 2.6.22-rc6, 2.6.22-rc7 — fixed in 6.1.134, 6.12.23, 6.13.11, 6.14.2, 6.6.87

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.1.134, 6.12.23, 6.13.11, 6.14.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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