CVE-2025-38591

Low

No strong exploitation signal.

CVSS base

5.5 MEDIUM

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

EPSS — probability of exploitation (30 days)

0.2%

9.8th percentile

CISA KEV

Not listed

Weakness / dates

—

Published 2025-08-19 · modified 2026-09-14

CVSS breakdown

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

Attack Vector	L	Local
Attack Complexity	L	Low
Privileges Required	L	Low
User Interaction	N	None
Scope	U	Unchanged
Confidentiality	N	None
Integrity	N	None
Availability	H	High

Timeline

2025-08-19 — Published (NVD)
2026-09-14 — Last modified (NVD)

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bpf: Reject narrower access to pointer ctx fields The following BPF program, simplified from a syzkaller repro, causes a kernel warning: r0 = *(u8 *)(r1 + 169); exit; With pointer field sk being at offset 168 in __sk_buff. This access is detected as a narrower read in bpf_skb_is_valid_access because it doesn't match offsetof(struct __sk_buff, sk). It is therefore allowed and later proceeds to bpf_convert_ctx_access. Note that for the "is_narrower_load" case in the convert_ctx_accesses(), the insn->off is aligned, so the cnt may not be 0 because it matches the offsetof(struct __sk_buff, sk) in the bpf_convert_ctx_access. However, the target_size stays 0 and the verifier errors with a kernel warning: verifier bug: error during ctx access conversion(1) This patch fixes that to return a proper "invalid bpf_context access off=X size=Y" error on the load instruction. The same issue affects multiple other fields in context structures that allow narrow access. Some other non-affected fields (for sk_msg, sk_lookup, and sockopt) were also changed to use bpf_ctx_range_ptr for consistency. Note this syzkaller crash was reported in the "Closes" link below, which used to be about a different bug, fixed in commit fce7bd8e385a ("bpf/verifier: Handle BPF_LOAD_ACQ instructions in insn_def_regno()"). Because syzbot somehow confused the two bugs, the new crash and repro didn't get reported to the mailing list.

Affected

linux

References

Official: NVD · CVE.org