CVE Catalog

CVE-2025-38331

HighCVSS 7.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.30%

23th percentile - higher than 23% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the Cortina (gemini) network driver in the Linux kernel, the TOE/TSO accelerator is not used for all TCP packets. Without this, the driver becomes unstable and may lock up.

Risk Assessment

Driver instability can lead to network outages, packet loss, and system crashes, especially under heavy load.

Recommendation

Apply the Linux kernel patch that enables TOE/TSO for all TCP packets in the Cortina driver.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

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Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: ethernet: cortina: Use TOE/TSO on all TCP It is desireable to push the hardware accelerator to also process non-segmented TCP frames: we pass the skb->len to the "TOE/TSO" offloader and it will handle them. Without this quirk the driver becomes unstable and lock up and and crash. I do not know exactly why, but it is probably due to the TOE (TCP offload engine) feature that is coupled with the segmentation feature - it is not possible to turn one part off and not the other, either both TOE and TSO are active, or neither of them. Not having the TOE part active seems detrimental, as if that hardware feature is not really supposed to be turned off. The datasheet says: "Based on packet parsing and TCP connection/NAT table lookup results, the NetEngine puts the packets belonging to the same TCP connection to the same queue for the software to process. The NetEngine puts incoming packets to the buffer or series of buffers for a jumbo packet. With this hardware acceleration, IP/TCP header parsing, checksum validation and connection lookup are offloaded from the software processing." After numerous tests with the hardware locking up after something between minutes and hours depending on load using iperf3 I have concluded this is necessary to stabilize the hardware.

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