Linux Sees Patches For "Critical" Vulnerability Affecting Many Arm CPUs
Made public today is CVE-2025-10263 as a "critical" security vulnerability affecting many different Arm CPU cores. CVE-2025-10263 could allow for privilege escalation on affected systems due to a specific timing condition during a memory permission change. Fundamentally it comes down to completion of affected memory accesses might not be guaranteed by the completion of a TLBI.
CVE-2025-10263 while assigned last year was only made public today for this issue that can allow writes to resources owned by a higher exception level as a means of achieving privilege escalation. Among the Arm cores affected are the latest C1-Ultra and C1-Premium as well as older cores such as Neoverse V3 & V3AE, Neoverse V2, Neoverse V1, Neoverse N2, and Neoverse N1. Additionally, the Cortex-X925, Cortex-X4, Cortex-X3, Cortex-X2, Cortex-X1 & X1C, Cortex-A710, Cortex-A78, A78AE & A78C, Cortex-A77, Cortex-A76 & A76AE are all affected as well.
The software workaround is that for any software performing TLB invalidation applying to stage 1 or stage 1 and 2 information must perform an additional TLBI and DSB. Details via the Arm bulletin.
This patch series posted today for the Linux kernel address that vulnerability with the necessary mitigation.
Separately, another patch from NVIDIA also confirms that their newest Olympus cores found in the NVIDIA Vera CPU are also affected by this vulnerability and mitigated with that follow-up patch.
CVE-2025-10263 while assigned last year was only made public today for this issue that can allow writes to resources owned by a higher exception level as a means of achieving privilege escalation. Among the Arm cores affected are the latest C1-Ultra and C1-Premium as well as older cores such as Neoverse V3 & V3AE, Neoverse V2, Neoverse V1, Neoverse N2, and Neoverse N1. Additionally, the Cortex-X925, Cortex-X4, Cortex-X3, Cortex-X2, Cortex-X1 & X1C, Cortex-A710, Cortex-A78, A78AE & A78C, Cortex-A77, Cortex-A76 & A76AE are all affected as well.
The software workaround is that for any software performing TLB invalidation applying to stage 1 or stage 1 and 2 information must perform an additional TLBI and DSB. Details via the Arm bulletin.
This patch series posted today for the Linux kernel address that vulnerability with the necessary mitigation.
👁 NVIDIA Vera with Olympus cores
Separately, another patch from NVIDIA also confirms that their newest Olympus cores found in the NVIDIA Vera CPU are also affected by this vulnerability and mitigated with that follow-up patch.