Red Hot Cyber
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The world of technology is a veritable battlefield, where coding geniuses challenge malicious attackers every day with exploits and security patches. That’s why the recent discovery of a vulnerability in the Linux kernel has caused a stir in the IT world: a security flaw, officially recognized as CVE-2025-68260, has been identified and fixed in the Linux kernel.
In practice, this vulnerability, affecting the Android Binder driver rewritten in Rust, could have caused significant problems for Linux users, including system crashes in the worst case. The significance of the discovery lies in the fact that it represents the first CVE formally assigned to Rust code in the mainline kernel.
For those interested in learning more, Greg Kroah-Hartman was instrumental in reporting and fixing the issue. In short, don’t panic, the flaw has been fixed, but the episode offers interesting insights for those interested in digital security and Linux kernel development.
At the heart of the bug is an unsafe operation within the Rust-based Binder implementation, in which an element is removed from a linked list while another thread can simultaneously manipulate the same previous/next pointers. The design assumed that a NodeDeath object would never appear in an “external” list; in practice, however, a scenario arose where the same element could be processed simultaneously by multiple contexts.
The problem stemmed from the logic of Node::release : a lock was acquired, all elements were moved to a stack-based temporary list, the lock was released, and then the local list was traversed. If, in parallel, another thread invoked an unsafe remove on the original list, a race condition would arise that corrupted the prev/next pointers, ultimately causing memory corruption and a kernel crash. An example error was “Failed to handle kernel paging request” in the rust_binder module.
The fix involved rewriting Node::release to extract items directly from the original list, eliminating the stack-based intermediate list altogether. According to the Linux kernel CVE team, the issue was introduced in Linux 6.18 (commit eafedbc7c050c44744fbdf80bdf3315e860b7513) and fixed in 6.18.1 (3428831264096d32f830a7fcfc7885dd263e511a), as well as 6.19-rc1 (3e0ae02ba831da2b707905f4e602e43f8507b8cc). The affected file is drivers/android/binder/node.rs.
The Linux kernel CVE team strongly recommends upgrading to a stable build of the current kernel as a risk mitigation strategy: individual changes aren’t subject to separate testing, and targeted patching doesn’t receive official support. If upgrading isn’t possible, you can find suitable fixes by consulting the mentioned commits in the stable branch repository.
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