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Fencer Intel
medium 5.5

CVE-2025-38121 json

wifi: iwlwifi: mld: avoid panic on init failure

published last yr. modified 4mo ago also EUVD-2025-19822

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 5%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

wifi: iwlwifi: mld: avoid panic on init failure

In case of an error during init, in_hw_restart will be set, but it will never get cleared. Instead, we will retry to init again, and then we will act like we are in a restart when we are actually not.

This causes (among others) to a NULL pointer dereference when canceling rx_omi::finished_work, that was not even initialized, because we thought that we are in hw_restart.

Set in_hw_restart to true only if the fw is running, then we know that FW was loaded successfully and we are not going to the retry loop.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.15.3, 6.16

Is CVE-2025-38121 in your stack? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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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-2025-38121 updated

kernel: wifi: iwlwifi: mld: avoid panic on init failure

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more 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
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

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

Exploit prediction

0.16% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 5% 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

Weakness
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.