Reference page — cumulative record through Wednesday, August 19, 2026 UTC. Reference pages update as the archive grows; only dated daily editions are immutable pages of record.
AV AC PR UI S C I A CVSS EPSS %ile KEV L H L N U N N H 4.7 .0013 2.9 —
AFFECTED Product Versions Fixed Linux 6ac392815628f317fcfdca1a39df00b9cc4ebc8b – — Linux 6.5 – 6.6.89
TIMELINE Apr 16 Reserved by Linux May 20 Published (CNA: Linux) Jul 30 RESCORED — CVE-2025-37988 (Linux). CVSS 7.8 → 4.7 (NVD).
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: fix a couple of races in MNT_TREE_BENEATH handling by do_move_mount() Normally do_lock_mount(path, _) is locking a mountpoint pinned by *path and at the time when matching unlock_mount() unlocks that location it is still pinned by the same thing. Unfortunately, for 'beneath' case it's no longer that simple - the object being locked is not the one *path points to. It's the mountpoint of path->mnt. The thing is, without sufficient locking ->mnt_parent may change under us and none of the locks are held at that point. The rules are * mount_lock stabilizes m->mnt_parent for any mount m. * namespace_sem stabilizes m->mnt_parent, provided that m is mounted. * if either of the above holds and refcount of m is positive, we are guaranteed the same for refcount of m->mnt_parent. namespace_sem nests inside inode_lock(), so do_lock_mount() has to take inode_lock() before grabbing namespace_sem. It does recheck that path->mnt is still mounted in the same place after getting namespace_sem, and it does take care to pin the dentry. It is needed, since otherwise we might end up with racing mount --move (or umount) happening while we were getting locks; in that case dentry would no longer be a mountpoint and could've been evicted on memory pressure along with its inode - not something you want when grabbing lock on that inode. However, pinning a dentry is not enough - the matching mount is also pinned only by the fact that path->mnt is mounted on top it and at that point we are not holding any locks whatsoever, so the same kind of races could end up with all references to that mount gone just as we are about to enter inode_lock(). If that happens, we are left with filesystem being shut down while we are holding a dentry reference on it; results are not pretty. What we need to do is grab both dentry and mount at the same time; that makes inode_lock() safe *and* avoids the problem with fs getting shut down under us. After taking namespace_sem we verify that path->mnt is still mounted (which stabilizes its ->mnt_parent) and check that it's still mounted at the same place. From that point on to the matching namespace_unlock() we are guaranteed that mount/dentry pair we'd grabbed are also pinned by being the mountpoint of path->mnt, so we can quietly drop both the dentry reference (as the current code does) and mnt one - it's OK to do under namespace_sem, since we are not dropping the final refs. That solves the problem on do_lock_mount() side; unlock_mount() also has one, since dentry is guaranteed to stay pinned only until the namespace_unlock(). That's easy to fix - just have inode_unlock() done earlier, while it's still pinned by mp->m_dentry.
| Date | Event | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| April 16, 2025 | Reserved | Reserved by Linux |
| May 20, 2025 | Published | Published (CNA: Linux) |
| July 30, 2026 | RESCORED | RESCORED — CVE-2025-37988 (Linux). CVSS 7.8 → 4.7 (NVD). |
Authoritative record: CVE-2025-37988 at cve.org
Vendors: linux
Weaknesses: CWE-362
This is a reference page, not a dated page of record. It assembles the complete lifecycle of CVE-2025-37988 from the CVE Program record, NVD enrichment, the CISA KEV catalog, EPSS, and OSV advisories. The box score's numbers (CVSS, EPSS, KEV status) are current as of Wednesday, August 19, 2026 UTC and are re-derived as the archive grows; only dated daily editions are immutable pages of record. The authoritative source for this identifier is cve.org.