What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-71161: dm-verity: disable recursive forward error correction

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: dm-verity: disable recursive forward error correction There are two problems with the recursive correction: 1. It may cause denial-of-service. In fec_read_bufs, there is a loop that has 253 iterations. For each iteration, we may call verity_hash_for_block recursively. There is a limit of 4 nested recursions - that means that there may be at most 253^4 (4 billion) iterations. Red Hat QE team actually created an image that pushes dm-verity to this limit - and this image just makes the udev-worker process get stuck in the 'D' state. 2. It doesn't work. In fec_read_bufs we store data into the variable "fio->bufs", but fio bufs is shared between recursive invocations, if "verity_hash_for_block" invoked correction recursively, it would overwrite partially filled fio->bufs.

Affected products

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.18.6. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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