{"id":"CVE-2025-68299","title":"In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:\n\nafs: Fix delayed allocation of a cell's anonymous key\n\nThe allocation of a cell's anonymous key is done in a background thread\nalong with other cell setup such as doing…","summary":"In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:\n\nafs: Fix delayed allocation of a cell's anonymous key\n\nThe allocation of a cell's anonymous key is done in a background thread\nalong with other cell setup such as doing…","severity":"none","published":"2025-12-16","updated":"2026-08-03","source":"NVD","sourceUrl":"https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-68299","references":[{"url":"https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5613bde937dfac6725e9c3fc766b9d6b8481e55b","label":"416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67"},{"url":"https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/bd18d2cbc9377c6b270c0b7ea44b0e6ed1d99c07","label":"416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67"},{"url":"https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d27c71257825dced46104eefe42e4d9964bd032e","label":"416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67"}],"tags":["nvd"],"epss":0.00261,"epssPercentile":0.18185,"ingestedAt":"2026-08-03T10:24:19.774Z","slug":"CVE-2025-68299","body":"## Overview\n\nIn the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:\n\nafs: Fix delayed allocation of a cell's anonymous key\n\nThe allocation of a cell's anonymous key is done in a background thread\nalong with other cell setup such as doing a DNS upcall.  In the reported\nbug, this is triggered by afs_parse_source() parsing the device name given\nto mount() and calling afs_lookup_cell() with the name of the cell.\n\nThe normal key lookup then tries to use the key description on the\nanonymous authentication key as the reference for request_key() - but it\nmay not yet be set and so an oops can happen.\n\nThis has been made more likely to happen by the fix for dynamic lookup\nfailure.\n\nFix this by firstly allocating a reference name and attaching it to the\nafs_cell record when the record is created.  It can share the memory\nallocation with the cell name (unfortunately it can't just overlap the cell\nname by prepending it with \"afs@\" as the cell name already has a '.'\nprepended for other purposes).  This reference name is then passed to\nrequest_key().\n\nSecondly, the anon key is now allocated on demand at the point a key is\nrequested in afs_request_key() if it is not already allocated.  A mutex is\nused to prevent multiple allocation for a cell.\n\nThirdly, make afs_request_key_rcu() return NULL if the anonymous key isn't\nyet allocated (if we need it) and then the caller can return -ECHILD to\ndrop out of RCU-mode and afs_request_key() can be called.\n\nNote that the anonymous key is kind of necessary to make the key lookup\ncache work as that doesn't currently cache a negative lookup, but it's\nprobably worth some investigation to see if NULL can be used instead.\n\n## Remediation\n\nRefer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.","depth":"sunlit","depthScore":3,"depthScoreParts":{"impact":2.8,"likelihood":0.1,"exploitation":0,"ransomware":0},"changes":[]}