CVE-2025-68299 | afs: Fix delayed allocation of a cell's anonymous key

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: afs: Fix delayed allocation of a cell's anonymous key The allocation of a cell's anonymous key is done in a background thread along with other cell setup such as doing a DNS upcall. In the reported bug, this is triggered by afs_parse_source() parsing the device name given to mount() and calling afs_lookup_cell() with the name of the cell. The normal key lookup then tries to use the key description on the anonymous authentication key as the reference for request_key() - but it may not yet be set and so an oops can happen. This has been made more likely to happen by the fix for dynamic lookup failure. Fix this by firstly allocating a reference name and attaching it to the afs_cell record when the record is created. It can share the memory allocation with the cell name (unfortunately it can't just overlap the cell name by prepending it with "afs@" as the cell name already has a '.' prepended for other purposes). This reference name is then passed to request_key(). Secondly, the anon key is now allocated on demand at the point a key is requested in afs_request_key() if it is not already allocated. A mutex is used to prevent multiple allocation for a cell. Thirdly, make afs_request_key_rcu() return NULL if the anonymous key isn't yet allocated (if we need it) and then the caller can return -ECHILD to drop out of RCU-mode and afs_request_key() can be called. Note that the anonymous key is kind of necessary to make the key lookup cache work as that doesn't currently cache a negative lookup, but it's probably worth some investigation to see if NULL can be used instead.

Published: 2025-12-16 Last update: 2026-04-15 Assigner: 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67 Source: 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67

Conclusion & alert: CVE-2025-68299 is rated Low Risk (16.9/100): low exploitation likelihood (EPSS 0.05%). Mandatory action: Low composite risk—no urgent action required; patch on your normal maintenance cycle and revisit priority if CVSS or EPSS increases.

Risk is dynamic; we continuously reassess and refresh what is shown on this page as upstream context changes.

Exploit prediction scoring system (EPSS) score for CVE-2025-68299

EPSS lead: Daily EPSS estimates relative likelihood of exploitation; percentile ranks this CVE among scored vulnerabilities (higher = more severe relative rank).

# Date Old EPSS score New EPSS score Delta (New - Old)
1 2026-01-17 0.03% 0.05% +0.02%
2 2025-12-17 0.03%

Full EPSS history (2 records total)

Common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) metrics for CVE-2025-68299

CVSS metrics for this CVE.

No CVSS data in dataset for this CVE.

Weakness enumeration for CVE-2025-68299

OS Trackers for CVE-2025-68299

vendor priority summary link
debian unimportant CVE-2025-68299 unimportant priority: Debian including 1 source packages (linux), 5 status rows across 5 suites (bookworm, bullseye, forky, sid, trixie): resolved 5. https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2025-68299
redhat medium https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2025-68299
suse medium CVE-2025-68299 severity moderate: SUSE including 26 source package names (cluster-md-kmp-default, dlm-kmp-default, …), 285 product×package rows across 56 product lines (SLES-LTSS-TERADATA 15 SP2, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 SP3, … (56 product lines)): Known Not Affected 285. https://www.suse.com/security/cve/CVE-2025-68299/
ubuntu medium CVE-2025-68299 medium priority: Ubuntu including 157 source packages (linux, linux-allwinner-5.19, …), 1405 status rows across 9 suites (bionic, focal, jammy, noble, plucky, questing, trusty, upstream, xenial): DNE 1010, ignored 172, not-affected 123, released 100. https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2025-68299

Affected software / configurations for CVE-2025-68299

Vendor Product Version Raw CPE
No affected products in dataset.

References for CVE-2025-68299

cvelogic Threat Intelligence