CVE-2025-21647

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

sched: sch_cake: add bounds checks to host bulk flow fairness counts

Even though we fixed a logic error in the commit cited below, syzbot still managed to trigger an underflow of the per-host bulk flow counters, leading to an out of bounds memory access.

To avoid any such logic errors causing out of bounds memory accesses, this commit factors out all accesses to the per-host bulk flow counters to a series of helpers that perform bounds-checking before any increments and decrements. This also has the benefit of improving readability by moving the conditional checks for the flow mode into these helpers, instead of having them spread out throughout the code (which was the cause of the original logic error).

As part of this change, the flow quantum calculation is consolidated into a helper function, which means that the dithering applied to the ost load scaling is now applied both in the DRR rotation and when a sparse flow's quantum is first initiated. The only user-visible effect of this is that the maximum packet size that can be sent while a flow stays sparse will now vary with +/- one byte in some cases. This should not make a noticeable difference in practice, and thus it's not worth complicating the code to preserve the old behaviour.

This vulnerability is rated as Moderate severity rather than Important because exploitation requires local access and the use of the non-default CAKE queue discipline. Standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux installations do not enable CAKE traffic shaping by default, significantly limiting exposure on typical production systems. In environments where this queuing discipline is explicitly configured, a local attacker sending crafted traffic could trigger out-of-bounds kernel memory reads, resulting in a denial of service or information leakage.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.