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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2025-38331 json

net: ethernet: cortina: Use TOE/TSO on all TCP

published last yr. modified 3mo ago also EUVD-2025-20915

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 30%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

net: ethernet: cortina: Use TOE/TSO on all TCP

It is desireable to push the hardware accelerator to also process non-segmented TCP frames: we pass the skb->len to the "TOE/TSO" offloader and it will handle them.

Without this quirk the driver becomes unstable and lock up and and crash.

I do not know exactly why, but it is probably due to the TOE (TCP offload engine) feature that is coupled with the segmentation feature - it is not possible to turn one part off and not the other, either both TOE and TSO are active, or neither of them.

Not having the TOE part active seems detrimental, as if that hardware feature is not really supposed to be turned off.

The datasheet says:

"Based on packet parsing and TCP connection/NAT table lookup results, the NetEngine puts the packets belonging to the same TCP connection to the same queue for the software to process. The NetEngine puts incoming packets to the buffer or series of buffers for a jumbo packet. With this hardware acceleration, IP/TCP header parsing, checksum validation and connection lookup are offloaded from the software processing."

After numerous tests with the hardware locking up after something between minutes and hours depending on load using iperf3 I have concluded this is necessary to stabilize the hardware.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.1.142, 6.6.95, 6.12.35, 6.15.4, 6.16
  • linux Debian 12 6.1.147-1
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13 6.12.35-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2025-38331

  • linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-100.100
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1046.49
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1047.50
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1043.48
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1044.44
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1046.52
  • linux-gkeop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1030.33
  • linux-raspi Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0-1047.51

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2025-38331

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 Azure Linux 3.0 6.6.96.1-1

azure linux advisories AZL-64901

Azure Linux vulnerability data, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, from https://github.com/microsoft/AzureLinuxVulnerabilityData via OSV, under the MIT licence; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. MIT

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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-2025-38331 updated

kernel: net: ethernet: cortina: Use TOE/TSO on all TCP

  • 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

0.36% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 30% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
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.