published December 16, 2025
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.