CVE-2025-40270

mm, swap: fix potential UAF issue for VMA readahead

State
Published
Severity
7.8 High
Published
Dec 6, 2025
Updated
Aug 5, 2026
Reserved
Apr 16, 2025

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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

mm, swap: fix potential UAF issue for VMA readahead

Since commit 78524b05f1a3 ("mm, swap: avoid redundant swap device pinning"), the common helper for allocating and preparing a folio in the swap cache layer no longer tries to get a swap device reference internally, because all callers of __read_swap_cache_async are already holding a swap entry reference. The repeated swap device pinning isn't needed on the same swap device.

Caller of VMA readahead is also holding a reference to the target entry's swap device, but VMA readahead walks the page table, so it might encounter swap entries from other devices, and call __read_swap_cache_async on another device without holding a reference to it.

So it is possible to cause a UAF when swapoff of device A raced with swapin on device B, and VMA readahead tries to read swap entries from device A. It's not easy to trigger, but in theory, it could cause real issues.

Make VMA readahead try to get the device reference first if the swap device is a different one from the target entry.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.17.8 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HLinux

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • 78524b05f1a3e16a5d00cc9c6259c41a9d6003ce to before a4145be7b56bfa87dce56415c3ad993071462b8aAffected
  • 78524b05f1a3e16a5d00cc9c6259c41a9d6003ce to before 1c2a936edd71e133f2806e68324ec81a4eb07588Affected
LinuxLinux
  • 6.15Affected
  • before 6.15Not affected
  • 6.17.9 through 6.17.*Not affected
  • 6.18 and laterNot affected

References

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