CVE-2025-68736

landlock: Fix handling of disconnected directories

State
Published
Severity
8.8 High
Published
Dec 24, 2025
Updated
Oct 16, 2026
Reserved
Dec 24, 2025

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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

landlock: Fix handling of disconnected directories

Disconnected files or directories can appear when they are visible and opened from a bind mount, but have been renamed or moved from the source of the bind mount in a way that makes them inaccessible from the mount point (i.e. out of scope).

Previously, access rights tied to files or directories opened through a disconnected directory were collected by walking the related hierarchy down to the root of the filesystem, without taking into account the mount point because it couldn't be found. This could lead to inconsistent access results, potential access right widening, and hard-to-debug renames, especially since such paths cannot be printed.

For a sandboxed task to create a disconnected directory, it needs to have write access (i.e. FS_MAKE_REG, FS_REMOVE_FILE, and FS_REFER) to the underlying source of the bind mount, and read access to the related mount point. Because a sandboxed task cannot acquire more access rights than those defined by its Landlock domain, this could lead to inconsistent access rights due to missing permissions that should be inherited from the mount point hierarchy, while inheriting permissions from the filesystem hierarchy hidden by this mount point instead.

Landlock now handles files and directories opened from disconnected directories by taking into account the filesystem hierarchy when the mount point is not found in the hierarchy walk, and also always taking into account the mount point from which these disconnected directories were opened. This ensures that a rename is not allowed if it would widen access rights [1].

The rationale is that, even if disconnected hierarchies might not be visible or accessible to a sandboxed task, relying on the collected access rights from them improves the guarantee that access rights will not be widened during a rename because of the access right comparison between the source and the destination (see LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REFER). It may look like this would grant more access on disconnected files and directories, but the security policies are always enforced for all the evaluated hierarchies. This new behavior should be less surprising to users and safer from an access control perspective.

Remove a wrong WARN_ON_ONCE() canary in collect_domain_accesses() and fix the related comment.

Because opened files have their access rights stored in the related file security properties, there is no impact for disconnected or unlinked files.

Scores

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

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • cb2c7d1a1776057c9a1f48ed1250d85e94d4850d to before 4f5cdc82a6c7e22cfd9a92d203cec13a52a3f363Affected
  • cb2c7d1a1776057c9a1f48ed1250d85e94d4850d to before fbf718d5afe21057694a0c0223a18b0c7a5960b6Affected
  • cb2c7d1a1776057c9a1f48ed1250d85e94d4850d to before 426d5b681b2f3339ff04da39b81d71176dc8c87cAffected
  • cb2c7d1a1776057c9a1f48ed1250d85e94d4850d to before cadb28f8b3fd6908e3051e86158c65c3a8e1c907Affected
  • cb2c7d1a1776057c9a1f48ed1250d85e94d4850d to before 49c9e09d961025b22e61ef9ad56aa1c21b6ce2f1Affected
LinuxLinux
  • 5.13Affected
  • before 5.13Not affected
  • 6.1.189 through 6.1.*Not affected
  • 6.6.143 through 6.6.*Not affected
  • 6.12.80 through 6.12.*Not affected
  • 6.18.2 through 6.18.*Not affected
  • 6.19 and laterNot affected

References

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