CVE-2025-68788: Linux

EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

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

Affected products

• Linux Linux: from 2.6.36, before 5.10.248 (fixed in 5.10.248); from 5.11, before 5.15.198 (fixed in 5.15.198); from 5.16, before 6.1.160 (fixed in 6.1.160); from 6.2, before 6.6.120 (fixed in 6.6.120); from 6.7, before 6.12.64 (fixed in 6.12.64); from 6.13, before 6.18.3 (fixed in 6.18.3)
• Siemens SIMATIC s7-1500 CPU 1518-4 Pn/dp Mfp: from V3.1.6
• Siemens SIMATIC s7-1500 CPU 1518f-4 Pn/dp Mfp: from V3.1.6
• Siemens Siplus s7-1500 CPU 1518-4 Pn/dp Mfp: from V3.1.6

Published 2026-01-13. Last modified 2026-07-14.