CVE-2025-68788 Affecting kernel-docs-html package, versions <6.12.0-160000.26.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.05% (16th percentile)

Do your applications use this vulnerable package?

In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.

Test your applications
  • Snyk IDSNYK-SLES1600-KERNELDOCSHTML-15432379
  • published6 Mar 2026
  • disclosed27 Feb 2026

Introduced: 27 Feb 2026

NewCVE-2025-68788  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade SLES:16.0.0 kernel-docs-html to version 6.12.0-160000.26.1 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-docs-html package and not the kernel-docs-html package as distributed by SLES. See How to fix? for SLES:16.0.0 relevant fixed versions and status.

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

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1