Summary

Vulnerability in Kernel (CVE-2025-21860). Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure. Mitigation: upgrade to 6.13.5 or later.

Original description

The description as published by the source.

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

mm/zswap: fix inconsistency when zswap_store_page() fails

Commit b7c0ccdfbafd ("mm: zswap: support large folios in zswap_store()")
skips charging any zswap entries when it failed to zswap the entire folio.

However, when some base pages are zswapped but it failed to zswap the
entire folio, the zswap operation is rolled back. When freeing zswap
entries for those pages, zswap_entry_free() uncharges the zswap entries
that were not previously charged, causing zswap charging to become
inconsistent.

This inconsistency triggers two warnings with following steps:

On a machine with 64GiB of RAM and 36GiB of zswap

$ stress-ng --bigheap 2 # wait until the OOM-killer kills stress-ng
$ sudo reboot

The two warnings are:
in mm/memcontrol.c:163, function obj_cgroup_release():
WARN_ON_ONCE(nr_bytes & (PAGE_SIZE - 1));

in mm/page_counter.c:60, function page_counter_cancel():
  if (WARN_ONCE(new < 0, "page_counter underflow: %ld nr_pages=%lu\n",
  new, nr_pages))

zswap_stored_pages also becomes inconsistent in the same way.

As suggested by Kanchana, increment zswap_stored_pages and charge zswap
entries within zswap_store_page() when it succeeds. This way,
zswap_entry_free() will decrement the counter and uncharge the entries
when it failed to zswap the entire folio.

While this could potentially be optimized by batching objcg charging and
incrementing the counter, let's focus on fixing the…

Source: OSV.dev (Open Source Vulnerabilities) NVD OSV

Auto-generated summary

Assembled by SecPulse from the source data (CVSS, CWE, affected versions) using templates — no AI involved. Check the original description and references below for exact details.

A vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-21860 has been found in Kernel.
Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure.
What to do: upgrade Kernel to 6.13.5 or later.
If unsure, ask your IT team or search "Kernel CVE-2025-21860" on the vendor's site.

CVE-2025-21860 (Kernel)
Patched: 6.13.5 — apply immediately
Plan: 1) Audit SBOM/dependencies, 2) Stage→prod upgrade, 3) Add WAF/proxy monitoring on affected endpoints, 4) Hunt IOCs in logs.
Refs: see the GHSA / vendor advisory / patched release linked on this page.

❓ What is the problem

A vulnerability (unclassified) exists in Kernel.

📍 Affected scope

Check the vendor advisory for the affected versions of Kernel.

🔥 Severity

Severity: ?. Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure.

🔧 How to fix

Update to 6.13.5.

🛡️ Workaround

Until the patch is applied: disable the affected feature, apply WAF rules, or restrict access via network ACLs.

🔍 Detection

Search webserver/proxy logs for unusual request patterns matching this CVE's known IOCs. Run grep -r 'Kernel' . against your dependency files (package-lock.json, requirements.txt, go.sum) to find affected services.

Response actions

Concrete steps and command examples for SOC/SRE teams to execute in order

1
Identify exposure identify
```
grep -r 'Kernel' . | grep -v node_modules
```
リポジトリと本番環境の依存ファイル (package-lock.json / requirements.txt / go.sum / Gemfile.lock 等) で Kernel を grep し、稼働しているサービス・バージョンを把握する。
2
Apply patch patch
```
Upgrade Kernel to 6.13.5
```
ステージング環境で 6.13.5 に上げて回帰テスト → 本番反映。回帰テストはアプリの主要ハッピーパスを含めること。
3
Post-deployment verification verify
```
Confirm patched version is live in production
```
パッチ適用後、ステージングで PoC または同等の悪用パターンを再現して脆弱性が閉じたことを確認。本番ではアクセスログ・WAF でアラート再発が無いか継続監視。

Affected packages

Linux Kernel

[{"type":"ECOSYSTEM","events":[{"introduced":"6.13.0"},{"fixed":"6.13.5"}]}]

Fix status by distribution

Fixed packages published by each distribution for this CVE

BellSoft Alpaquita BELL-CVE-2025-21860 linux-lts Fixed in: 6.18.35-r1