CVE Catalog

CVE-2025-37996

HighCVSS 8.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.14%

4th percentile - higher than 4% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the Linux kernel, KVM for ARM64 has a bug where an uninitialized memcache pointer is used in user_mem_abort(). This can cause crashes on paths requiring stage-2 allocation without transitioning via a permission fault or dirty logging.

Risk Assessment

This could lead to unexpected termination of a virtual machine or the host system, causing service disruption.

Recommendation

Update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix for CVE-2025-37996.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: KVM: arm64: Fix uninitialized memcache pointer in user_mem_abort() Commit fce886a60207 ("KVM: arm64: Plumb the pKVM MMU in KVM") made the initialization of the local memcache variable in user_mem_abort() conditional, leaving a codepath where it is used uninitialized via kvm_pgtable_stage2_map(). This can fail on any path that requires a stage-2 allocation without transition via a permission fault or dirty logging. Fix this by making sure that memcache is always valid.

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