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Fencer Intel
medium 5.5

CVE-2025-38031 json

padata: do not leak refcount in reorder_work

published last yr. modified 4d ago also EUVD-2025-18621

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 11%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

padata: do not leak refcount in reorder_work

A recent patch that addressed a UAF introduced a reference count leak: the parallel_data refcount is incremented unconditionally, regardless of the return value of queue_work(). If the work item is already queued, the incremented refcount is never decremented.

Fix this by checking the return value of queue_work() and decrementing the refcount when necessary.

Resolves:

Unreferenced object 0xffff9d9f421e3d80 (size 192): comm "cryptomgr_probe", pid 157, jiffies 4294694003 hex dump (first 32 bytes): 80 8b cf 41 9f 9d ff ff b8 97 e0 89 ff ff ff ff ...A............ d0 97 e0 89 ff ff ff ff 19 00 00 00 1f 88 23 00 ..............#. backtrace (crc 838fb36): __kmalloc_cache_noprof+0x284/0x320 padata_alloc_pd+0x20/0x1e0 padata_alloc_shell+0x3b/0xa0 0xffffffffc040a54d cryptomgr_probe+0x43/0xc0 kthread+0xf6/0x1f0 ret_from_fork+0x2f/0x50 ret_from_fork_asm+0x1a/0x30

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 5.10.238, 5.15.185, 6.1.141, 6.6.93, 6.12.31, 6.14, 6.14.9, 6.15
  • linux Debian 12 6.1.147-1
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13 6.12.32-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2025-38031

  • linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-152.162
  • linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-100.100
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1090.97
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1046.49
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1090.99
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1047.50
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1087.93
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1043.48

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2025-38031

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • kernel-coco SLE Module for Confidential Computing Technical Preview 15 SP6 6.4.0-15061.28.coco15sp6.1
  • kernel-syms-coco SLE Module for Confidential Computing Technical Preview 15 SP6 6.4.0-15061.28.coco15sp6.1
  • kernel-coco_debug SLE Module for Confidential Computing Technical Preview 15 SP6 6.4.0-15061.28.coco15sp6.1
  • kernel-source-coco SLE Module for Confidential Computing Technical Preview 15 SP6 6.4.0-15061.28.coco15sp6.1
  • dtb-aarch64 openSUSE Leap 15.6 6.4.0-150600.23.60.3
  • kernel-64kb SLE Module for Basesystem 15 SP6, openSUSE Leap 15.6 6.4.0-150600.23.60.4
  • kernel-syms SLE Module for Development Tools 15 SP6, openSUSE Leap 15.6 6.4.0-150600.23.60.4
  • kernel-obs-qa openSUSE Leap 15.6 6.4.0-150600.23.60.2

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2025:02923-1SUSE-SU-2025:02538-1SUSE-SU-2025:20498-1SUSE-SU-2025:20483-1SUSE-SU-2025:02335-1SUSE-SU-2025:02333-1

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2025-38031 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: padata: do not leak refcount in reorder_work

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    affected: no fix available “Fix deferred”

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
4d ago

Exploit prediction

0.21% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 11% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

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

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.