Deserialization of Untrusted Data Affecting torvalds/linux package, versions [3.7,5.4.295)[5.5,5.10.239)[5.11,5.15.186)[5.16,6.1.187)[6.2,6.6.156)[6.7,6.12.108)[6.13,6.15.4)
Threat Intelligence
The probability is the direct output of the EPSS model, and conveys an overall sense of the threat of exploitation in the wild. The percentile measures the EPSS probability relative to all known EPSS scores. Note: This data is updated daily, relying on the latest available EPSS model version. Check out the EPSS documentation for more details.
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Start learning- Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-TORVALDSLINUX-20699600
- published10 Oct 2026
- disclosed4 Jul 2025
- creditUnknown
Introduced: 4 Jul 2025
CVE-2025-38203 (opens in a new tab)How to fix?
Upgrade torvalds/linux to version 5.4.295, 5.10.239, 5.15.186, 6.1.187, 6.6.156, 6.12.108, 6.15.4 or higher.
Overview
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data in the jfs_ioc_trim function. An attacker can cause a null pointer dereference and trigger a kernel panic by exploiting a race condition where a pointer is set to NULL in one process and dereferenced in another. This is only exploitable if concurrent operations on the JFS filesystem lead to specific interleavings that result in the pointer being set to NULL before it is accessed.
Note: The Linux kernel project assigns a CVE to every bug fix it ships, whether or not the bug has been shown to be exploitable. This advisory was generated from that process and has not been individually assessed for exploitability. See the kernel's CVE process documentation: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/process/cve.rst
Details
Serialization is a process of converting an object into a sequence of bytes which can be persisted to a disk or database or can be sent through streams. The reverse process of creating object from sequence of bytes is called deserialization. Serialization is commonly used for communication (sharing objects between multiple hosts) and persistence (store the object state in a file or a database). It is an integral part of popular protocols like Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Java Management Extension (JMX), Java Messaging System (JMS), Action Message Format (AMF), Java Server Faces (JSF) ViewState, etc.
Deserialization of untrusted data (CWE-502) is when the application deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid, thus allowing the attacker to control the state or the flow of the execution.