CVEvulnerability
CVE-2025-21921
5.5 MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Status
- Analyzed
- Published
- 2025-04-01
- Last modified
- 2026-06-17
- Assigner
- 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
- CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
- 5.5 MEDIUM — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-476
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net: ethtool: netlink: Allow NULL nlattrs when getting a phy_device
ethnl_req_get_phydev() is used to lookup a phy_device, in the case an
ethtool netlink command targets a specific phydev within a netdev's
topology.
It takes as a parameter a const struct nlattr *header that's used for
error handling :
if (!phydev) {
NL_SET_ERR_MSG_ATTR(extack, header,
"no phy matching phyindex");
return ERR_PTR(-ENODEV);
}
In the notify path after a ->set operation however, there's no request
attributes available.
The typical callsite for the above function looks like:
phydev = ethnl_req_get_phydev(req_base, tb[ETHTOOL_A_XXX_HEADER],
info->extack);
So, when tb is NULL (such as in the ethnl notify path), we have a nice
crash.
It turns out that there's only the PLCA command that is in that case, as
the other phydev-specific commands don't have a notification.
This commit fixes the crash by passing the cmd index and the nlattr
array separately, allowing NULL-checking it directly inside the helper.
Affected configurations
• linux linux kernel (>= 6.12 < 6.12.19)
• linux linux kernel (>= 6.13 < 6.13.7)
• linux linux kernel 6.14
Related
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-476 NULL Pointer Dereference weakness