CVE-2025-21710 — tcp: correct handling of extreme memory squeeze

Affected: Linux

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

tcp: correct handling of extreme memory squeeze

Testing with iperf3 using the "pasta" protocol splicer has revealed a problem in the way tcp handles window advertising in extreme memory squeeze situations.

Under memory pressure, a socket endpoint may temporarily advertise a zero-sized window, but this is not stored as part of the socket data. The reasoning behind this is that it is considered a temporary setting which shouldn't influence any further calculations.

However, if we happen to stall at an unfortunate value of the current window size, the algorithm selecting a new value will consistently fail to advertise a non-zero window once we have freed up enough memory. This means that this side's notion of the current window size is different from the one last advertised to the peer, causing the latter to not send any data to resolve the sitution.

The problem occurs on the iperf3 server side, and the socket in question is a completely regular socket with the default settings for the fedora40 kernel. We do not use SO_PEEK or SO_RCVBUF on the socket.

The following excerpt of a logging session, with own comments added, shows more in detail what is happening:

// tcp_v4_rcv(->) // tcp_rcv_established(->) [5201<->39222]: ==== Activating log @ net/ipv4/tcp_input.c/tcp_data_queue()/5257 ==== [5201<->39222]: tcp_data_queue(->) [5201<->39222]: DROPPING skb [265600160..…

USN-7521-1 — linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.11, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.11, linux-hwe-6.11, linux-oem-6.11, linux-raspi, linux-rea…

Affected: Ubuntu:24.04:LTS: linux-azure-6.11, Ubuntu:24.04:LTS: linux-gcp-6.11, Ubuntu:24.04:LTS: linux-hwe-6.11, Ubuntu:24.04:LTS: linux-oem-6.11

Several security issues were discovered in the Linux kernel. An attacker could possibly use these to compromise the system. This update corrects flaws in the following subsystems: - ARM64 architecture; - PowerPC architecture; - x86 architecture; - Block layer subsystem; - Serial ATA and Parallel ATA drivers; - Drivers core; - Network block device driver; - Bluetooth drivers; - Character device driver; - TPM device driver; - Clock framework and drivers; - Hardware crypto device drivers; - FireWire subsystem; - EFI core; - Qualcomm firmware drivers; - GPIO subsystem; - GPU drivers; - HID subsystem; - I2C subsystem; - I3C subsystem; - InfiniBand drivers; - Input Device (Mouse) drivers; - IOMMU subsystem; - Multiple devices driver; - Media drivers; - NVIDIA Tegra memory controller driver; - Fastrpc Driver; - Network drivers; - Operating Performance Points (OPP) driver; - PCI subsystem; - x86 platform drivers; - PPS (Pulse Per Second) driver; - PTP clock framework; - Remote Processor subsystem; - Real Time Clock drivers; - S/390 drivers; - SCSI subsystem; - QCOM SoC drivers; - SPI subsystem; - Media staging drivers; - Trusted Execution Environment drivers; - TTY drivers; - UFS subsystem; - USB Device Class drivers; - USB core drivers; - USB Gadget drivers; - USB Host Controller drivers; - Framebuffer layer; - File systems infrastructure; - BTRFS file system; - Ceph distributed fi…

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CVE-2025-21710 — tcp: correct handling of extreme memory squeeze

USN-7521-1 — linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.11, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.11, linux-hwe-6.11, linux-oem-6.11, linux-raspi, linux-rea…