CVE-2025-21777 ring-buffer: Validate the persistent meta data subbuf array

What is CVE-2025-21777?

CVE-2025-21777 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 27 Feb 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

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

ring-buffer: Validate the persistent meta data subbuf array

The meta data for a mapped ring buffer contains an array of indexes of all the subbuffers. The first entry is the reader page, and the rest of the entries lay out the order of the subbuffers in how the ring buffer link list is to be created.

The validator currently makes sure that all the entries are within the range of 0 and nr_subbufs. But it does not check if there are any duplicates.

While working on the ring buffer, I corrupted this array, where I added duplicates. The validator did not catch it and created the ring buffer link list on top of it. Luckily, the corruption was only that the reader page was also in the writer path and only presented corrupted data but did not crash the kernel. But if there were duplicates in the writer side, then it could corrupt the ring buffer link list and cause a crash.

Create a bitmask array with the size of the number of subbuffers. Then clear it. When walking through the subbuf array checking to see if the entries are within the range, test if its bit is already set in the subbuf_mask. If it is, then there is duplicates and fail the validation. If not, set the corresponding bit and continue.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-21777?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2025-21777?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2025-21777 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-21777 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

• CVE-2026-53266 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2013-6282 Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2022-0185 Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2013-2094 Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Exploited High 7.8

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as BELL-CVE-2025-21777, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-21777, GHSA-g8qj-5wmw-7w59, UBUNTU-CVE-2025-21777.