CVE-2025-38273

Updated on 10 Jul 2025

Severity

5.5 Medium severity

Details

CVSS score
5.5
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Overview

About vulnerability

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

net: tipc: fix refcount warning in tipc_aead_encrypt

syzbot reported a refcount warning 1 caused by calling get_net() on a network namespace that is being destroyed (refcount=0). This happens when a TIPC discovery timer fires during network namespace cleanup.

The recently added get_net() call in commit e279024617134 (“net/tipc: fix slab-use-after-free Read in tipc_aead_encrypt_done”) attempts to hold a reference to the network namespace. However, if the namespace is already being destroyed, its refcount might be zero, leading to the use-after-free warning.

Replace get_net() with maybe_get_net(), which safely checks if the refcount is non-zero before incrementing it. If the namespace is being destroyed, return -ENODEV early, after releasing the bearer reference.

Details

Affected packages:
kernel @ 5.14.0 (+3 more)

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

net: tipc: fix refcount warning in tipc_aead_encrypt

syzbot reported a refcount warning 1 caused by calling get_net() on a network namespace that is being destroyed (refcount=0). This happens when a TIPC discovery timer fires during network namespace cleanup.

The recently added get_net() call in commit e279024617134 (“net/tipc: fix slab-use-after-free Read in tipc_aead_encrypt_done”) attempts to hold a reference to the network namespace. However, if the namespace is already being destroyed, its refcount might be zero, leading to the use-after-free warning.

Replace get_net() with maybe_get_net(), which safely checks if the refcount is non-zero before incrementing it. If the namespace is being destroyed, return -ENODEV early, after releasing the bearer reference.

Fixes