NULL Pointer Dereference Affecting kernel-devel package, versions <6.4.0-150600.23.38.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server security rating.

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Not Defined
EPSS
0.04% (6th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-SLES156-KERNELDEVEL-8728203
  • published14 Feb 2025
  • disclosed13 Feb 2025

Introduced: 13 Feb 2025

NewCVE-2025-21676  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-476  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade SLES:15.6 kernel-devel to version 6.4.0-150600.23.38.1 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-devel package and not the kernel-devel package as distributed by SLES. See How to fix? for SLES:15.6 relevant fixed versions and status.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

net: fec: handle page_pool_dev_alloc_pages error

The fec_enet_update_cbd function calls page_pool_dev_alloc_pages but did not handle the case when it returned NULL. There was a WARN_ON(!new_page) but it would still proceed to use the NULL pointer and then crash.

This case does seem somewhat rare but when the system is under memory pressure it can happen. One case where I can duplicate this with some frequency is when writing over a smbd share to a SATA HDD attached to an imx6q.

Setting /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes to higher values also seems to solve the problem for my test case. But it still seems wrong that the fec driver ignores the memory allocation error and can crash.

This commit handles the allocation error by dropping the current packet.

CVSS Scores

version 3.1