CVE-2025-21737

Summary

CVE-2025-21737 is a vulnerability affecting the Linux kernel that stemmed from a memory leak in the function ceph_mds_auth_match within the ceph module. This issue occurred due to a failure to free a temporary target path substring allocation in certain branches. The memory leak could potentially crash the system if many file accesses were attempted. The vulnerability was discovered in a production environment due to continuous memory growth, ultimately leading to a kernel out-of-memory (OOM) error and a complete system lock-up. The vulnerability can be triggered by mounting a subdirectory of a CephFS filesystem and trying to access files using a path-scoped capability.

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