CVE-2025-38528

Updated on 16 Aug 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:

bpf: Reject %p% format string in bprintf-like helpers

static const char fmt[] = “%p%”; bpf_trace_printk(fmt, sizeof(fmt));

The above BPF program isn’t rejected and causes a kernel warning at runtime:

Please remove unsupported %\x00 in format string WARNING: CPU: 1 PID: 7244 at lib/vsprintf.c:2680 format_decode+0x49c/0x5d0

This happens because bpf_bprintf_prepare skips over the second %, detected as punctuation, while processing %p. This patch fixes it by not skipping over punctuation. %\x00 is then processed in the next iteration and rejected.

Details

Affected packages:
linux @ 5.4.0 (+2 more)

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

bpf: Reject %p% format string in bprintf-like helpers

static const char fmt[] = “%p%”; bpf_trace_printk(fmt, sizeof(fmt));

The above BPF program isn’t rejected and causes a kernel warning at runtime:

Please remove unsupported %\x00 in format string WARNING: CPU: 1 PID: 7244 at lib/vsprintf.c:2680 format_decode+0x49c/0x5d0

This happens because bpf_bprintf_prepare skips over the second %, detected as punctuation, while processing %p. This patch fixes it by not skipping over punctuation. %\x00 is then processed in the next iteration and rejected.

Fixes