CVE-2025-71161: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: dm-verity: disable recursive forward error correction There are two problems with the recursive correction: 1. It may cause denial-of-service. In fec_read_bufs, there is a loop that has 253 iterations. For each iteration, we may call verity_hash_for_block recursively. There is a limit of 4 nested recursions - that means that there may be at most 253^4 (4 billion) iterations. Red Hat QE team actually created an image that pushes dm-verity to this limit - and this image just makes the udev-worker process get stuck in the 'D' state. 2. It doesn't work. In fec_read_bufs we store data into the variable "fio->bufs", but fio bufs is shared between recursive invocations, if "verity_hash_for_block" invoked correction recursively, it would overwrite partially filled fio->bufs.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 4.5, before 6.18.6 (fixed in 6.18.6)

Published 2026-01-23. Last modified 2026-07-30.