CVE-2025-71113

Technical Description

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

crypto: af_alg - zero initialize memory allocated via sock_kmalloc

Several crypto user API contexts and requests allocated with

sock_kmalloc() were left uninitialized, relying on callers to

set fields explicitly. This resulted in the use of uninitialized

data in certain error paths or when new fields are added in the

future.

The ACVP patches also contain two user-space interface files:

algif_kpp.c and algif_akcipher.c. These too rely on proper

initialization of their context structures.

A particular issue has been observed with the newly added

'inflight' variable introduced in af_alg_ctx by commit:

67b164a871af ("crypto: af_alg - Disallow multiple in-flight AIO requests")

Because the context is not memset to zero after allocation,

the inflight variable has contained garbage values. As a result,

af_alg_alloc_areq() has incorrectly returned -EBUSY randomly when

the garbage value was interpreted as true:

https:

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from linux. Update linux_kernel to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

Affected Products

References