CVE-2025-21632 — x86/fpu: Ensure shadow stack is active before "getting" registers

Affected: Linux

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

x86/fpu: Ensure shadow stack is active before "getting" registers

The x86 shadow stack support has its own set of registers. Those registers are XSAVE-managed, but they are "supervisor state components" which means that userspace can not touch them with XSAVE/XRSTOR. It also means that they are not accessible from the existing ptrace ABI for XSAVE state. Thus, there is a new ptrace get/set interface for it.

The regset code that ptrace uses provides an ->active() handler in addition to the get/set ones. For shadow stack this ->active() handler verifies that shadow stack is enabled via the ARCH_SHSTK_SHSTK bit in the thread struct. The ->active() handler is checked from some call sites of the regset get/set handlers, but not the ptrace ones. This was not understood when shadow stack support was put in place.

As a result, both the set/get handlers can be called with XFEATURE_CET_USER in its init state, which would cause get_xsave_addr() to return NULL and trigger a WARN_ON(). The ssp_set() handler luckily has an ssp_active() check to avoid surprising the kernel with shadow stack behavior when the kernel is not ready for it (ARCH_SHSTK_SHSTK==0). That check just happened to avoid the warning.

But the ->get() side wasn't so lucky. It can be called with shadow stacks disabled, triggering the warning in practice, as reported by Christina Schimpe:

WARNING: CPU: 5 PID: 1773 at arch/x86/kernel/fpu/regset.c:198…

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CVE-2025-21632 — x86/fpu: Ensure shadow stack is active before "getting" registers