Linux Kernel CVE-2025-68736

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

landlock: Fix handling of disconnected directories

Disconnected files or directories can appear when they are visible and opened from a bind mount, but have been renamed or moved from the source of the bind mount in a way that makes them inaccessible from the mount point (i.e. out of scope).

Previously, access rights tied to files or directories opened through a disconnected directory were collected by walking the related hierarchy down to the root of the filesystem, without taking into account the mount point because it couldn't be found. This could lead to inconsistent access results, potential access right widening, and hard-to-debug renames, especially since such paths cannot be printed.

For a sandboxed task to create a disconnected directory, it needs to have write access (i.e. FS_MAKE_REG, FS_REMOVE_FILE, and FS_REFER) to the underlying source of the bind mount, and read access to the related mount point. Because a sandboxed task cannot acquire more access rights than those defined by its Landlock domain, this could lead to inconsistent access rights due to missing permissions that should be inherited from the mount point hierarchy, while inheriting permissions from the filesystem hierarchy hidden by this mount point instead.

Landlock now handles files and directories opened from disconnected directories by taking into account the filesystem hierarchy when the mount point is not found in the hierarchy walk, and also always taking into account the mount point from which these disconnected directories were opened. This ensures that a rename is not allowed if it would widen access rights [1].

The rationale is that, even if disconnected hierarchies might not be visible or accessible to a sandboxed task, relying on the collected access rights from them improves the guarantee that access rights will not be widened during a rename because of the access right comparison between the source and the destination (see LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REFER). It may look like this would grant more access on disconnected files and directories, but the security policies are always enforced for all the evaluated hierarchies. This new behavior should be less surprising to users and safer from an access control perspective.

Remove a wrong WARN_ON_ONCE() canary in collect_domain_accesses() and fix the related comment.

Because opened files have their access rights stored in the related file security properties, there is no impact for disconnected or unlinked files.

The affected product is the mainline and stable Linux kernel Landlock subsystem; specific fixed/vulnerable version boundaries are not enumerated in the provided NVD data, which lists only remediation commits (426d5b681b2f, 49c9e09d9610, cadb28f8b3fd, fbf718d5afe2 at https://git.kernel.org/stable/) rather than CPE ranges. Distribution exposure is confirmed for Ubuntu, whose advisory USN-8177-1 (https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-8177-1) tracks the fixed kernel packages; consult that advisory for exact per-release fixed package versions. Only kernels that both include the Landlock LSM and have it in active use by a workload are practically affected.