CVE Catalog

CVE-2025-37949

HighCVSS 7.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.18%

8th percentile - higher than 8% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the Linux kernel xenbus subsystem, a race condition in request lifetime management was found. After wake_up() is called, another thread may free the request memory (kfree) before xenbus_thread uses it, causing a null pointer dereference.

Risk Assessment

The organization is at risk of kernel panics in Xen environments due to a data race in xenbus_thread, potentially disrupting virtual machine operations.

Recommendation

Update the Linux kernel to a version that uses kref to track request lifetimes, preventing premature memory freeing.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

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Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: xenbus: Use kref to track req lifetime Marek reported seeing a NULL pointer fault in the xenbus_thread callstack: BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000000 RIP: e030:__wake_up_common+0x4c/0x180 Call Trace: <TASK> __wake_up_common_lock+0x82/0xd0 process_msg+0x18e/0x2f0 xenbus_thread+0x165/0x1c0 process_msg+0x18e is req->cb(req). req->cb is set to xs_wake_up(), a thin wrapper around wake_up(), or xenbus_dev_queue_reply(). It seems like it was xs_wake_up() in this case. It seems like req may have woken up the xs_wait_for_reply(), which kfree()ed the req. When xenbus_thread resumes, it faults on the zero-ed data. Linux Device Drivers 2nd edition states: "Normally, a wake_up call can cause an immediate reschedule to happen, meaning that other processes might run before wake_up returns." ... which would match the behaviour observed. Change to keeping two krefs on each request. One for the caller, and one for xenbus_thread. Each will kref_put() when finished, and the last will free it. This use of kref matches the description in Documentation/core-api/kref.rst

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS