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CVE-2025-68788 Detail

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: fsnotify: do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events on child for special files inotify/fanotify do not allow users with no read access to a file to subscribe to events (e.g. IN_ACCESS/IN_MODIFY), but they do allow the same user to subscribe for watching events on children when the user has access to the parent directory (e.g. /dev). Users with no read access to a file but with read access to its parent directory can still stat the file and see if it was accessed/modified via atime/mtime change. The same is not true for special files (e.g. /dev/null). Users will not generally observe atime/mtime changes when other users read/write to special files, only when someone sets atime/mtime via utimensat(). Align fsnotify events with this stat behavior and do not generate ACCESS/MODIFY events to parent watchers on read/write of special files. The events are still generated to parent watchers on utimensat(). This closes some side-channels that could be possibly used for information exfiltration [1]. [1] https://snee.la/pdf/pubs/file-notification-attacks.pdf


Metrics

NVD enrichment efforts reference publicly available information to associate vector strings. CVSS information contributed by other sources is also displayed.
CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
N/A
NVD assessment not yet provided.

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URL Source(s) Tag(s)
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/635bc4def026a24e071436f4f356ea08c0eed6ff kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6a7d7d96eeeab7af2bd01afbb3d9878a11a13d91 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7a93edb23bcf07a3aaf8b598edfc2faa8fbcc0b6 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/82f7416bcbd951549e758d15fc1a96a5afc2e900 kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e0643d46759db8b84c0504a676043e5e341b6c81 kernel.org

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source

Change History

1 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2025-68788
NVD Published Date:
01/13/2026
NVD Last Modified:
01/13/2026
Source:
kernel.org